Proton and ingame videos

[Olathoë]

I'm having problems with Proton playing ingame videos for many games. Some videos work but for some games they don't. I tried to go through compatibility reports and it seems that this is a common problem. I'd guess about 1 in 3 ingame videos are the problematic sort.

There seems to be surprisingly little information about the issue considering how many games seem to have problem. I would have guessed this was about the videos being in some proprietary format and Windows having build-in codecs. I'm still experiencing the problem even with gstreamer's Ugly plugins and I'm out of ideas.

I was wondering if anyone got this one figured and got the problematic videos working?

[Aoi Blue]

Make sure you have the full prerequesites for wine's video stack.

Simply installing a wine version from wine's repositories and installing all dependencies should solve the issue.

For the official wine packages see:
https://wiki.winehq.org/Download

It contains links to distro specific instructions for most major distros.

[Cat on Linux]

videos even in plain wine require complex approach by installing codecs, flash and some of windows media specific DLLs. sometimes even this step won't ensure any stable result so it's often advised to just skip videos where available.
pcgaming wiki site has instructions per game on various settings, including videos. you might want to check it for games in question to see if you can fix the issue.

[Olathoë]

Originally posted by Cat on Linux:

videos even in plain wine require complex approach by installing codecs, flash and some of windows media specific DLLs. sometimes even this step won't ensure any stable result so it's often advised to just skip videos where available.
pcgaming wiki site has instructions per game on various settings, including videos. you might want to check it for games in question to see if you can fix the issue.

I spend earlier much time trying to get videos working in plain Wine and decided to try again and see if someone had got somewhere further this day. I personally think Proton should really address this issue as soon as possible for skipping/disabling or just accepting crashing videos isn't viable. For Wine it hasn't been fundamental issue, but for Proton the baseline should be different. I understand the legal and such problems windows dlls have in open-source world and I really hope Valve had some kind of resourcess to fix the issue.

I think in my case most of the videos that have problems are in wmv-format. Not sure if that is the only reason, but I searched which games had wmv videos just put in some folder and those games didn't play videos. As I understood at some point with Wine the most common fix was to install Devenum and Quartz dlls, wmp9 and windows codecs to get videos working. I believe wmv should however nowaday work with just having (32 or 64bit according to the game) Ffmpeg, Gstreamer and Ugly plugins. But it seems those aren't enough.

[Cat on Linux]

Assuming that Proton is same wine with some steam integration, I would not expect any miracle from it. Valve can't ship their Proton prefix with corefonts, leave alone codecs.

[Olathoë]

They can't, but as a multi-billion dollar corporation they are in different position to negotiate. I don't see a scenario where Valve would negotiate some sort of permission to use (more or less) obsolate codecs with Proton.

With corefonts I believe things have come forward in later years. I don't really remember when was the last time I had prefix with corefonts installed. I have one game in my backlog that has font-related issues whereas problems with videos seem to be a really common issue.

[Aoi Blue]

Originally posted by Cat on Linux:

videos even in plain wine require complex approach by installing codecs, flash and some of windows media specific DLLs. sometimes even this step won't ensure any stable result so it's often advised to just skip videos where available.
pcgaming wiki site has instructions per game on various settings, including videos. you might want to check it for games in question to see if you can fix the issue.

That information is sort of obsolete.

Currently the all major current codecs are supported by wine, but rely on underlying software in Linux.

The list supported is your standard slate of the ones installed by default on Windows: WMA, WMV, MPEG Codecs, VP6, VP7, VP8 and VP9, Vorbis, FLAC, Opus, etc.
It supports standard container codecs codecs of Wav, AVI, Mov, WMA/WMV, WebM, MPEG, MP3

Because of the reliance on underlying software you need both 64bit and 32bit versions several libraries to handle this.

This is why I say to simply install wine staging and it's suggested items, it depends on all this stuff.

[Olathoë]

I've had Wine Staging installed, but had similar problems with it I'm having with Proton.

I noticed I didn't have lib32-gst-plugins-bad installed, so that would be the next step I should try. Unfortunately the package has like a gazillion dependencies and when I tried building that from Arch's User Repository it failed because of lib32-zbar not building... That was a very well spent 2 hours.

[Cat on Linux]

Originally posted by Aoi Blue:

That information is sort of obsolete.

what is obsolete? have you found a way to skip installation of codecs and different dependencies in wine-staging to make your videos and sound work out of the box with empty prefix?
you still need to apply set of changes to wine prefix and to your OS to make that possible.

[Minisori]

Originally posted by Aoi Blue:

Originally posted by Cat on Linux:

videos even in plain wine require complex approach by installing codecs, flash and some of windows media specific DLLs. sometimes even this step won't ensure any stable result so it's often advised to just skip videos where available.
pcgaming wiki site has instructions per game on various settings, including videos. you might want to check it for games in question to see if you can fix the issue.

That information is sort of obsolete.

Currently the all major current codecs are supported by wine, but rely on underlying software in Linux.

The list supported is your standard slate of the ones installed by default on Windows: WMA, WMV, MPEG Codecs, VP6, VP7, VP8 and VP9, Vorbis, FLAC, Opus, etc.
It supports standard container codecs codecs of Wav, AVI, Mov, WMA/WMV, WebM, MPEG, MP3

Because of the reliance on underlying software you need both 64bit and 32bit versions several libraries to handle this.

This is why I say to simply install wine staging and it's suggested items, it depends on all this stuff.

It's not that easy to install both architectures in every distribution since not all packages are multiarch. If i recall correctly some of the gstreamer packages are not multiarch in debian and derivates. So the easier way in 64bit system to get them working is to install the codecs in the wine prefix.

[Aoi Blue]

Originally posted by Olathoë:

I've had Wine Staging installed, but had similar problems with it I'm having with Proton.

I noticed I didn't have lib32-gst-plugins-bad installed, so that would be the next step I should try. Unfortunately the package has like a gazillion dependencies and when I tried building that from Arch's User Repository it failed because of lib32-zbar not building... That was a very well spent 2 hours.

Yeah, that is where Arch can be a pain.

It is the price you pay for an OS tailored to your system. Honestly, I can't wait for multi-stage compilers to evolve to allow for half-compiled source caches to be shipped with self-rolling distros like Arch and Gentoo.

Anyhow, that is the proper way to do it. You also need to check which version of GStreamer Wine is linked to. It may be linked to GStreamer 1 and you may be installing GStreamer 2. This can cause it not to work as well.

I wish that Wine would link directly to FFMEG and libVLC instead of going through GStreamer. However, GStreamer does provide support for an end to end solution which provides better A/V syncing. I understand why they use it.

You may need the ugly set for a hanful of legacy codecs typically only found in a few games. This is things like codec compressed A/V encoded into AVI and/or WAV formats and the historically troublesome Apple Mov format that even causes trouble for Windows users, being responsible for many of the "won't work on newer versions of Windows" issues.

[Taipan.GAV]

Good day!

How are things going with watching videos in Proton games today?
Is there any way to make it work?

[Inukaze]

Hi there, this is an a very old problem with WineHQ versions specially with formats like :
MPEG-1
Intel Indeo
True Motion
etc . . .

Well you can find on WineHQ using the Bug ID Number :
https://appdb.winehq.org/viewbugs.php?iBugId=9127
https://appdb.winehq.org/viewbugs.php?iBugId=35478

Another Games with similar Bugs are erased from the AppDB List like :
Severance - Blade : The Edge Of Darkness
Zwei!! The Arges Adventure

For years i had try to make some package with fix from Wine 1.2 i had put on my spanish share document for my GNU/Linux Telegram Group -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yn_3TEAon5Q2g4WMFJSzYgDxZC-19dpUZipO_LXazuw/edit?usp=sharing

At the end of file i had put text with links to MediaFire / Google Drive for a few games like :
Street Racing Syndicate
Commandos 2 : Men Of Courage
Resident Evil 4
紅蓮華 -ぐれんか-
Zwei!! The Arges Adventure

The mayority of InGames Videos Playback can be fixed installing «K-Lite Codec Pack» and configuring it, for example « Blade : The Edge Of Darkness » using this is the unique know method for easy fix the ingame video playback. when you set the MPEG-1 to « ffdshow »

You just need open for example in the Wine / Proton prefix the « winefile.exe » search and open « Codec Tweak Tool » ( The default path is C:\users\Public\Start Menu\Programs\K-Lite Codec Pack\Codec Tweak Tool.lnk )

Sadly still today i don't found a definitive fix for all ingame videos playback, because requiere a strangely specific files, wine configuration and registry entries without errors.

[Olathoë]

Originally posted by Inukaze:

Hi there, this is an a very old problem with WineHQ versions specially with formats like :
MPEG-1
Intel Indeo
True Motion
etc . . .

Well you can find on WineHQ using the Bug ID Number :
https://appdb.winehq.org/viewbugs.php?iBugId=9127
https://appdb.winehq.org/viewbugs.php?iBugId=35478

Another Games with similar Bugs are erased from the AppDB List like :
Severance - Blade : The Edge Of Darkness
Zwei!! The Arges Adventure

For years i had try to make some package with fix from Wine 1.2 i had put on my spanish share document for my GNU/Linux Telegram Group -> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yn_3TEAon5Q2g4WMFJSzYgDxZC-19dpUZipO_LXazuw/edit?usp=sharing

At the end of file i had put text with links to MediaFire / Google Drive for a few games like :
Street Racing Syndicate
Commandos 2 : Men Of Courage
Resident Evil 4
紅蓮華 -ぐれんか-
Zwei!! The Arges Adventure

The mayority of InGames Videos Playback can be fixed installing «K-Lite Codec Pack» and configuring it, for example « Blade : The Edge Of Darkness » using this is the unique know method for easy fix the ingame video playback. when you set the MPEG-1 to « ffdshow »

You just need open for example in the Wine / Proton prefix the « winefile.exe » search and open « Codec Tweak Tool » ( The default path is C:\users\Public\Start Menu\Programs\K-Lite Codec Pack\Codec Tweak Tool.lnk )

Sadly still today i don't found a definitive fix for all ingame videos playback, because requiere a strangely specific files, wine configuration and registry entries without errors.

This is indeed very old problem :) I think first game I managed to get videos tinkered in working condition was the first Trails in the Sky and that was maybe 2016. In those days Wine was very different thing and didn't even have proper controller support :D

Unlike controller support and other crucial stuff, the video playback issues have persisted until this year. There's been much improvement with Proton's video playback in 2021.
Actually maybe over half of the games that had issues with videos now work with Proton or Proton-GE, that is based on newer version of Wine. Just whenever new version of Proton is released, I check if some games that had issues start working. The only one still unplayable is Megaman X legacy collection's X4.

I've played both Zwei! couple of months ago and they started playing videos. Then there was some audio delay, but that might have been fixed meanwhile. Also there was Trails of cold Steel that turned working with newer Proton. This month I got videos of Kill it With Fire working just by changing to Proton-GE. Also there has been couple of games that had embedded videos in gameplay, that started working with newer versions of Proton.

[Inukaze]

Well the first game I managed to get videos tinkered in working condition was Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne in 2004. WineHQ every week is very diferent the past week.

Valve is making a wonderful work with Proton, Well i don't had that Megaman X Legacy Collection for search by myself the playback ingame video fix. i know with the Native version for Windows until Megaman X7. i prefer use Wine until version 3.20 with : Quartz, DirectMusic, DSound

Because the Wine version from 3.21 start to use GStreamer for Video Decode, and well on my machine never works via Wine / Proton that decoder method of ingame playback with old games ( 1996 ~ 2010 )

i had that fix in this link -> {LINK REMOVED}https://www.mediafire.com/file/tqw05n71da1fsjs/Inukaze--Wine_3.20_x86--MPEG-FIX--MegamanX7.7z/file

This just solve the MPEG2 & Indeo this is just a more specific than Zwei. With Megaman X8 (Korean) translated. this fix does not work i just see certain images but the sound play normally, and with GStreamer the system just try but does not work neither.

The InGames Videos playback the RetroGames is more common present this problem

Dunno : You know where i can download specific version of proton versions for example the Proton 3.7 ?

[Olathoë]

Originally posted by Inukaze:

Because the Wine version from 3.21 start to use GStreamer for Video Decode, and well on my machine never works via Wine / Proton that decoder method of ingame playback with old games ( 1996 ~ 2010 )

Dunno : You know where i can download specific version of proton versions for example the Proton 3.7 ?

I rember I was very hyped years ago when GStreamer backend arrived in Wine, but then felt dissapointed, because I got only couple of games working with gstreamer plugins after long work.

Steam distributes some older Proton versions. Just check game's compatibility options. 3.7-8 is the earliest available. If you're looking something more specific, then I don't know. I personally prefer using newest releases... I remember experiencing quite much weird performance issues with Proton 3.