I haven't tried those. Do you how to add those codecs manually?

Also, I checked Wine-GE github and they stopped making releases, or did they move somewhere?

If it's the proprietary Media Foundation windows codecs, there used to be mfplat installation workarounds for wine prefixes, but I'm not sure those work any longer. The mediafoundation codecs in winetricks are likely not the ones that will fix the video playback issues - those proprietary ones are different. In addition, GE adds some sort of proprietary gstreamer and ffmpeg codecs, so it could be those too.

It's a long story, but the dev is working on a project (Unified Linux Wine Game Launcher) for mimicking Valve's Steam Proton ecosystem, so that all the millions of patches and hotfixes and performance upgrades work outside of Steam.

They are primarily going to integrated into Lutris and Heroic (Bottles too?), but I'm sure there will be a way to get it working outside of those. They will trivialise running games through it though.

More here:
https://github.com/Open-Wine-Components/umu-launcher?tab=readme-ov-file#what-is-this

Right now the latest GE wine outside of Steam is 8-26 (which should be plenty). GE-Proton on Steam is newer though, of course, and based on bleeding edge proton/wine.


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In any case, I'm guessing you do not use Lutris/Heroic/Bottles and Protonup-qt? Then I guess your options are

1) download the latest wine-ge-custom release, and use the wine inside that, e.g.:

WINEPREFIX="/home/username/wineprefix" "/wine-ge/bin/wine" game.exe

2) Hunt down those codecs, especially mfplat (there used to be a repo somewhere with a script) and pray they are the missing ones.

3) Build your own wine with specific patches using TKG's scripts
https://github.com/Frogging-Family/wine-tkg-git

4) Alternatively just use Lutris/Heroic/Bottles and download Wine-GE (manually or for example with Protonup-qt, that is very handy). These make things very simple and smooth and will likely fix everything.

I personally have to use Wine-GE for some games to see cutscenes (Phoenix Point, Wasteland 3, Pillars of Eternity, Borderlands 3, and others), but I don't do manual wine prefixes anymore. Lutris and Heroic spoiled me.

Well, I wouldn't mind some recent build, but without that whole unified design and pressure capsule etc. I'd rather use something more basic.

I'll take a look at tkg config scripts.

Found this fix repo and will try it: https://github.com/HoodedDeath/mf-fix

Nope, no dice. I'll stop wasting time on this mfplat junk and will just skip games that depend on it.

I am tracking here some games you should avoid, and some other ones I could get to work despite their reliance on Media Foundation videos: Inability to play Media Foundation video files.

Thanks, luckily it's not too common. I'm surprised engines like Unreal and Unity still use this trash.

What was your method for making them work? Media in the Unity games is all encoded into their blobs. I can check Youtube for cutscenes I guess as a crude workaround.

Doesn't get anymore basic than option 1 or 4. tkg scripts are pretty basic too, compiling wine just takes some time.

Hope you find something that works for you though!

You can check the linked commits/branches for details about each game. My generic method was dead simple: wait for stable WINE releases to pick up improved support for Media Foundation videos, and ensure the required GStreamer decoders are available to the game (by setting them in the packages dependencies).

While waiting for the WINE updates I used to rely on this repo:
https://github.com/z0z0z/mf-install
But I don’t remember it bringing any benefit to vanilla WINE in the last couple years.

Yeah, I basically tried all that including that fix script. That didn't help. I suspect some bugs are just not fixed yet even in latest Wine.

For now I simply stopped worrying about cutscenes - they are available on Youtube. Blood West game itself is pretty good.

There is one issue with keyboard being lost when you Alt + Tab and back. This can be worked around by enabling Wayland driver instead of X11 in the wine prefix. I should start using Wayland mode for more games.

Bug report: https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56936

I'm playing Blood West without cutscenes. The game is really good and it's easy to find cutscenes on YouTube.

Though related, looks like Wine developers are considering moving from gstreamer to something else (may be ffmpeg?). I hope that will help improving this situation eventually:

https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/merge_requests/5340#note_75745

Sounds awful. I would just try to figure it out and just use Wine-GE/wine-tkg already. Problem solved.

I looked at it - TKG is too much hassle figuring out how to make minimal patchsets that I need. And GE altogether is moving into some Proton like set up which I don't need either. So not such good options both. I tried setting up tkg literally several times and not much help from that community on that either. Each time despite selecting what I need it ended up adding a bunch of stuff that wasn't related so I sort of gave up wasting time on it.

Wine staging in contrast is pretty easy to work with. So I use patches from there for esync and build dxvk / vkd3d-proton on their own. That's all that I have modified from upstream Wine.

Video situation will hopefully eventually improve. No idea why stuff from Proton couldn't make it to upstream Wine for that - I guess they use some ugly hacks.

Yeah, TkG's scripts and compiling his wine can be daunting, due to all the options in the config files and picking the right patches, and the possibility of a lot of things breaking.

But Wine-GE you literally download and install manually or with Protonup-Qt into Lutris or Heroic, and off you go. That is, unless you specifically don't want to use them, then it gets a bit trickier to get wine-ge running properly outside of Lutris/Heroic (they have some added bits built-in I believe).

And it really doesn't matter that it's Wine-GE 8-26; nothing much has happened since then that's crucial (unless you need a specific game fix from wine 9+).

Those Mediafoundation codecs are proprietary, and shouldn't be included in GE's either, I believe it's a bit of a...close your eyes and hope nobody notices situation. And Valve apparently figured out how to do it legally, through some magic or maybe transcoding in Proton and Steam runtime :speculatingface: It remains to be seen how Wine devs will handle it...

Anyways, just wanted to chime in say that I've gotten cutscenes working quite easily on numerous games with Wine-GE+Lutris/Heroic, when they weren't with other wine versions. Note: I had to specifically use downloaded GE runners, as the bundled GE ones in Lutris/Heroic still had missing cutscenes for some games. It's worth a try!