I’m looking for some advice on handling games that use Media Foundation, as I’m running into some challenges and can’t find clear, updated information. There was a time when attempts were made to reverse-engineer the Media Foundation libraries, but it seems like that project never really took off. Instead, Valve started re-encoding videos for their Steam releases. I also recall Proton-GE had builds that included Media Foundation support.
Currently, I’m struggling to get videos to play in a non-Steam game using Heroic or Lutris. The game appears to use the Cinepak codec within an AVI file, which I’ve barely researched. I’ve noticed that Wine 10 made some attempt since I caught the flicker of a video frame before the game crashed. I didn’t dive deeper into Wine yet, but I’m curious about why Proton-GE isn’t resolving my issue.
The game may potentially use something other than Media Foundation. I keep hitting a test pattern in Proton-GE when I expect a video, which reminds me of past experiences with Media Foundation problems. So I’m really hoping someone can shed light on the current state of Media Foundation in Proton. Shouldn’t it be functioning correctly, or am I merely facing a strange edge case? Would installing Media Foundation through Winetricks or a third-party script help, considering I’ve heard reports of issues with standard Winetricks installations?
2 Answers
Wine has improved its support for Media Foundation significantly. Some titles, like Blood West, began working seamlessly with cutscenes for me after updates. Not sure how Proton tracks those improvements, but it’s worth trying to see if things run smoothly right out of the box.
I had similar problems with Media Foundation a while back, but most of my games ended up using more standard codecs as time went on. It’s possible you’re running into a missing codec in GStreamer rather than a Media Foundation issue specifically. You might want to test the video’s playback in a GStreamer-enabled app to figure it out!
Thanks for the tip! I tried with SMPlayer and even tested it with a raw `gst-launch` pipeline just to be sure. Both worked fine! Your suggestion about codec issues led me to re-encode one of the videos into H264, and now it’s starting to render the first frame. Looks like it could just be a quirky codec situation after all.
That’s interesting! I remember Valve does some re-encoding on their end, especially for certain formats like WMV, to ensure videos work properly in their games. I thought they might handle all formats now since I haven’t faced issues with videos in Steam games recently.