Edit: It has already been mentioned, above.
A Plex employee finally replied—after a spectacle was stirred—explaining that they have forwarded the concern and upon further investigation, it should be fixed once they update their FFmpeg libraries in the near future. Let me underscore here that I won’t dial down the rhetoric until I actually see action, because talk is cheap. How about this: with a well-managed software company, a customer never needs to rouse a spectacle in order to coax them to finally address a valid, widely reported, year-plus-old issue. If I had not made a spectacle, this issue would still be getting old and stale and many of us would be wondering why in the world our widely reported, dated issues had gone unaddressed, many for over a year now. Yes, Plex is at fault here and no, I was well within my rights after countless people’s complaints had been falling on deaf ears for far too long. And yes, Plex needs to learn a valuable lesson: they need to take customer concerns far more seriously and attentively and stop blaming customers for their own internal management issues.
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Voted… Really need this on my QNAP with AMD APU… I need the PCIe for an SAS extension card. So thi means I need to kick my Nvidia card out…
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Just received this thorough and thoughtful response from a Plex employee. I will still update this thread periodically to keep the ball rolling.
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By the way, for anyone looking to get a dirt cheap Ryzen APU media server up and running, you can get this for $100 (automatically accepted best offer) on eBay. It has a full Video Core Next unit in it with up to HEVC 10-bit and 4K encoding ready and waiting. In Jellyfin, it can easily push out up to five 1080p streams and up to three 4K streams simultaneously.
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Voted, hopefully this sees some official support soon.
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+1 I really need this in my current server. Without using my AMD GPU my server can’t even transcode 1080p movies fast enough.
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In same boat… AMD setup, great setup, but crap performance from Plex - voted… but really don’t expect much from them. The bar is fairly low when it comes to anything from them but ‘low hanging fruit’… If they have to get up, put in effort, it’s unlikely to happen.
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So true. ffmpeg already fixed this well over a year ago and, as a result, this bug does not occur in Handbrake which utilizes ffmpeg. So no, the issue isn’t with main branch ffmpeg. So no, the issue is not with the upstream ffmpeg codebase. The issue with Plex’s downstream fork of the ffmpeg codebase. I cannot state this any more plainly: they need to fix Plex’s broken code!
Now then, three weeks ago, I finally got a slightly more thoughtful response where it was said there was a “plan.” However, it was just a rough idea with no specifics, with just the employee saying that they have “a lot of new code” to write and “it’s not yet complete” so don’t expect a fix any time soon. I was kind to the employee because they said more and actually put more time and effort in, but it was pretty lackluster for a company of Plex’s size and scale.
The funny part is I have regularly communicated with software companies and even freeware GitHub projects. Many of these are run by just one person. Yet they are readily willing to give out more solid information and provide a rough timeline and plan of what to expect.
Here, it seems most of the Plex employees are just paid to troll their forums and give lame excuses. It sounds a lot like the corrupt insurance company Insuricare in The Incredibles that just is looking for ways to appease customers without actually following through with solid commitments and tangible deliverables.
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I’m reading conflicting reports. So does it unofficially work with a Linux server using VA-API?
Yes, except only with an unofficial modified Docker image which does not support HDR tone mapping.
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Today marks almost four months since my initial posting with no publicly released fix from the Plex Team for me, a new paying Plex Pass user. Shame on you, Plex development team.
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Cross-post: I just tried the latest release of Plex Media Server (1.22.1.4228) on my Windows machine, and I am still getting the same issues. Here are some screenshots demonstrating this ongoing issue for your viewing pleasure (or viewing annoyance?). All heck breaks loose as soon as I enable the option “Use hardware-accelerated video encoding.” CPU usage drops and my integrated GPU engages as expected on my Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G, but this confounded pixel distortion begins to wreak its havoc on all my media when transcoding occurs. Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard of both Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White, but have you ever been introduced to Gandalf the Blue or Gandalf the Yellow 
?
Gandalf the Blue
Gandalf the Yellow
One Does Not Simply Encode With Pixel Distortion
Arwen Is NOT Impressed
The RX 5000 series GPUs have been around for almost two whole years now and all the latest generation AMD GPUs and APUs released since 2019 still are plagued by this very same issue. I realize development can add maybe a year delay to implement things, but even then Handbrake had this issue within ffmpeg resolved well under a year’s time and that is FREE software. We are now nearing the TWO -year mark for the RX 5700’s release (July 2019), which uses the same updated derivative of Video Core Next that the Ryzen 4000G series APUs like my 4750G has. And yet, with almost two years down, there is still no fix in sight for Windows users. It’s downright disgraceful to be quite honest.
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Thank you Hifihedgehog for your continued posts on this important topic. I’m also disappointed in Plex for ignoring AMD for so long. My 4650g awaits being put to full use and I can’t wait to remove the Nvidia card from my system as I need the PCI slot for other expansion needs.
It’s frustrating that the Plex team can’t even bother to acknowledge the issue further or provide any meaningful updates on their intentions.
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Bringing this full circle, yes, AMD’s encoders do not have as high as quality as NVIDIA’s or Intel’s latest generation encoder but let’s not also forget that Plex’s transcoder is a two-sided coin with hardware decoding as well. Also, as I had noted earlier, their hardware encoder does not exhibit the pixel distortion issue with either HEVC or h.264 in Handbrake which is also built directly from ffmpeg. To the point, AMD’s decoder is totally a different story from their encoder (see here: Does anyone review video decoding quality any more? | AnandTech Forums: Technology, Hardware, Software, and Deals). Their decoder has long been considered superior to certainly Intel’s, and slightly better than NVIDIA’s.
For me at least, AMD’s decoder comes very, very close to MadVR which is considered the gold standard for decoders by HTPC enthusiasts. That would mean of course that there is less quality loss when you use hardware decoding on AMD hardware. So yes, you may get better raw encoding quality with Intel or NVIDIA but that is tested generally without hardware decoding active, in the context of game streaming where you are capturing raw video from your screen. In contrast, in our use case, Plex uses both hardware encoding and decoding in the transcoding process and you want the least quality loss when decoding in real time in hardware before the source frames are passed to the hardware encoder.
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It is a pity, but I will keep this alive until we get full satisfaction as paying customers. While the Plex team certainly fails to execute, I fully believe they have the technical ability to perform. I honestly believe it is a organizational issue that is their stumbling block as it is in many companies today (e.g. look no further than Intel who is losing majorly to AMD, a tiny company with a tenth of the employee base). There are extremely intelligent people working at Plex because I have seen absolutely brilliant technical comments here from them. They are smart. They just do not work smart.
It is the incessant excuses and lack of customer-friendliness that needs to be attended to so they can focus on the execution of the things that truly matter like this. It is the classic example of the dirty car and the hose nozzle. If you use the broad and open mouth of the hose without the nozzle, you aren’t going to get much of the grime off of the car. But with the focused and narrow beam of water from the jet setting on a nozzle attached to that hose, you are going to make quick work of it.
Precisely focused goals with clearly defined plans of action is what would bring Plex back to their glory days. You can tell from Plex’s Arcade announcement they lack this vision because they used mostly flowery, superfluous language. There is nothing wrong with imagery and other lingual techniques from a creative or PR standpoint, per se. But a strong framework of intentions and direction needs to also be in that messaging to bring purpose to your employees within your company along with trust from the customers looking from the outside in.
This marks the difference between true confidence (when you know you have something huge that gives you the ability to naturally perform well so you calmly exude inner strength) and phony braggadocio (when you have to be a loud mouth to pretend or prove to others you have something worthwhile that you are not even sure of yourself). Never mind they lack a sense of personal responsibility or confidence and blamed the customers in that announcement if Plex Arcade fails. There they stated that it would fail miserably if we did not throw our support behind it as if we owed it to them.
Resorting to sugar coating in company culture without much substance underneath is a surefire way to see rapid growth immediately followed by rapid decay, time after time. That is why we keep seeing them release products like their media players or VR that last for maybe a few years, only to get quickly abandoned and rapidly replaced yet again by the next fancy-labeled elixir they try peddling to the masses. Instead of repeatedly throwing mud at the wall and hoping something will stick, Plex needs to focus on goal setting and goal keeping—vision and commitment!
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Vote +1
Just purchased a Minis Forum x400 with the AMD Ryzen Pro 7 4750G. It will be a huge upgrade from my intel-i5 2 core which has been my mini server for many things including Plex. It has served well with the quick sync option with 1-2 720p simultaneous streams but I also want to host game servers and the like. Anyways, it is sad to see Plex doesn’t support hardware acceleration for AMD APU’s. AMD has intel on the run for sure and I am a long time AMD fan. I’ve never owned or built a computer of mine that was ever intel based. I believe Plex is missing a huge market on this while they drag their feet. They’d rather spend time finding ways to milk their current users by adding IMHO useless features like Plex Arcade or stripping features like removing the ability to use plugins. They’ve had plenty of time to implement AMD APU support. Come on Plex get it together!
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It’s sad to not see any respone from Plex on this issue. With the growing market share of AMD processors, this should already be implemented.
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Agreed.
Here’s hoping they respond soon with a notification that they are implementing it. We’re a top voted request, after all. *fingers crossed*
