I’m looking for some guidance on how to effectively work with games that utilize Media Foundation as of 2025. I’ve been running into difficulties finding up-to-date information, but I know there was a push to reverse-engineer the Media Foundation libraries, which ultimately didn’t pan out. Valve opted for re-encoding their video files, particularly for Steam releases. I’ve also seen Proton-GE versions that include built-in Media Foundation support. However, I’ve been struggling to get videos to play in a non-Steam game when using tools like Heroic or Lutris. The game in question is supposedly using the Cinepak codec inside an AVI container. Curiously, I noticed that Wine 10 was able to render a video frame before crashing, but I haven’t dug too deep into the crash details yet. I’m also unsure if the game is using something else instead of Media Foundation, as I keep getting a test pattern in Proton-GE. Can anyone clarify the current situation with Media Foundation in Proton? Is it expected to function correctly, or is the issue possibly an unusual edge case? Would installing Media Foundation through Winetricks or a third-party script help? I’ve heard there could be complications with the regular Winetricks installation.
2 Answers
Wine has made significant strides in supporting Media Foundation lately. From my experience, a few games like Blood West started playing cutscenes seamlessly, which was a huge improvement. As for Proton, they tend to incorporate Wine improvements over time, so it might work better now than before.
I had my share of issues with Media Foundation, but it turned out the root of my problems was the codecs rather than Media Foundation itself. You might be facing a codec shortage in GStreamer. Try playing the video with a GStreamer-compatible app to see if that’s the case.
Good point! I tested GStreamer, and it worked well for me. I also ran a raw `gst-launch` pipeline, and it all seemed fine. The codec issue sparked an idea for me to re-encode one of my videos to H264, and guess what? The first frame rendered! So it really could be an odd codec issue.
That’s interesting to hear! I know Valve does some re-encoding for their games, like WMV formats in Space Engineers, to ensure videos play correctly. It makes sense that they’d be consistently improving video playback in Steam games.