What is the state of Linux hardware transcoding with AMD CPUs?

Plex Media Server
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Server Version#: 1.20.4.3517
CPU: AMD FX-8300 8-core

There are several, long threads, with varying, conflicting responses, including some that suggest that the official docs are inaccurate.

So my question is, what is the current state of Plex hardware acceleration on a Linux based Plex Media server?

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Hardware accelerated transcoding is fully functional on Linux-based Plex Media Servers, provided one of the following two conditions is met:

  1. You are using an Intel or AMD CPU paired with a supported Nvidia GPU, with appropriate drivers installed.
  2. You are using an Intel CPU with an integrated GPU supporting Intel Quick Sync Video. This requires no dedicated GPU.

There’s actually a third case, where you have an Intel CPU with integrated GPU plus a dedicated Nvidia GPU. But this is just a special case of the first configuration and not relevant to this question.

AMD GPUs (included those integrated in their APUs) cannot currently be used for hardware accelerated transcoding. There’s a feature request floating around somewhere to add support for AMD GPUs to Linux.

Note: Whatever CPU you use needs to have sufficient processing power to potentially transcode audio and handle other streaming-related tasks.

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Thanks… the follow up question to that is, what are the supported Nvidia GPUs? I attempted a Google search on this before replying, mixed results. Also, once the elements are in place, how does one confirm that it’s actually working?

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Nvidia GPUs which provide NVENC and NVDEC support:

When playing back media which is being transcoded, open the Plex dashboard in the web client. Expand details and look for (hw) next to the streams. This question is actually addressed by the docs:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/#toc-4

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Thanks… I missed the (hw) from the docs.

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Intel uses VA-API in order to transcode media. AMD uses VA-API to transcode media. Intel is supported, AMD, which usually doesn’t evey require any intervention for driver installation in Linux (same as Intel, totally unlike nVidia) is not.
This is the reason why I don’t have a PlexPass: you pay for software, you don’t get support.

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