Posted July 21, 2024
I installed Myst ME through Lutris using the ScummVM runner on my Ubuntu 22.04 machine. The game was running flawlessly until I interacted with a key on the ground in the Stone Age. The game would play the animation and then crash. I searched everywhere for a clear solution, but couldn't find one, so I'm posting one here in the hopes of saving others the trouble.
When Myst plays an animation it's actually just playing a video file. For me, these were all stored in my Games/gog/myst-masterpiece-edition/qtw directory. It turns out that Myst uses an obsolete video encoding format called Cinepak, and some of the video files are stored as a different format for some reason. When I had the folder open in a file explorer, the bad files had clearly corrupted colors in the thumbnails, but I don't know how universal that might be. If you want to make sure, right-click the video, select "Properties", and then go to the "Video" tab. It should list the Codec as something other than "Cinepak Video".
Cinepak is so obsolete that most modern video encoders don't even have it as an option, so I ended up using FFmpeg in the command line. So start by making sure you have FFmpeg installed by running
sudo apt install ffmpeg
If you need more help with installing ffmpeg, it shouldn't be too hard to find resources with a quick Google search.
Next we need to convert the offending files to the Cinepak format. In your terminal, navigate to the folder with the corrupted MOV file. Right-click the file, go to "Properties", select the "Video" tab and make note of the video dimensions. For whatever reason the conversion will only work if both the width and height of the video are a multiple of four.
The command I used for the conversion is as follows:
ffmpeg -i FILENAME.MOV -s WIDTHxHEIGHT -c:v cinepak -q:v 1 OUT.MOV && mv OUT.MOV FILENAME.MOV
where you should replace "FILENAME" with the name of the video file. You also need to change "WIDTH" and "HEIGHT" to numbers that are multiples of four. This will resize the video, so you want to choose values that are as close as possible to the original's dimensions. So, for example, if the original is 95x65, choose something like 96x64. Hit enter and the file should be converted. Go through the rest of the folders, identify all of the files that are not Cinepak, and convert them.
Myst ME will be able to read the video files just fine now. The process is a bit tedious, but it works. I should also note that it will probably look slightly janky since the dimensions of the video won't be exactly correct to line-up with the pre-rendered background of the scene. If anyone has a better workaround that avoids this, please feel free to share, but for my part, I just wanted the game to stop crashing. Finally, if you want to avoid spoilers, try not to watch the videos ;). Good luck and enjoy the game!
When Myst plays an animation it's actually just playing a video file. For me, these were all stored in my Games/gog/myst-masterpiece-edition/qtw directory. It turns out that Myst uses an obsolete video encoding format called Cinepak, and some of the video files are stored as a different format for some reason. When I had the folder open in a file explorer, the bad files had clearly corrupted colors in the thumbnails, but I don't know how universal that might be. If you want to make sure, right-click the video, select "Properties", and then go to the "Video" tab. It should list the Codec as something other than "Cinepak Video".
Cinepak is so obsolete that most modern video encoders don't even have it as an option, so I ended up using FFmpeg in the command line. So start by making sure you have FFmpeg installed by running
sudo apt install ffmpeg
If you need more help with installing ffmpeg, it shouldn't be too hard to find resources with a quick Google search.
Next we need to convert the offending files to the Cinepak format. In your terminal, navigate to the folder with the corrupted MOV file. Right-click the file, go to "Properties", select the "Video" tab and make note of the video dimensions. For whatever reason the conversion will only work if both the width and height of the video are a multiple of four.
The command I used for the conversion is as follows:
ffmpeg -i FILENAME.MOV -s WIDTHxHEIGHT -c:v cinepak -q:v 1 OUT.MOV && mv OUT.MOV FILENAME.MOV
where you should replace "FILENAME" with the name of the video file. You also need to change "WIDTH" and "HEIGHT" to numbers that are multiples of four. This will resize the video, so you want to choose values that are as close as possible to the original's dimensions. So, for example, if the original is 95x65, choose something like 96x64. Hit enter and the file should be converted. Go through the rest of the folders, identify all of the files that are not Cinepak, and convert them.
Myst ME will be able to read the video files just fine now. The process is a bit tedious, but it works. I should also note that it will probably look slightly janky since the dimensions of the video won't be exactly correct to line-up with the pre-rendered background of the scene. If anyone has a better workaround that avoids this, please feel free to share, but for my part, I just wanted the game to stop crashing. Finally, if you want to avoid spoilers, try not to watch the videos ;). Good luck and enjoy the game!
Post edited July 21, 2024 by Mufusto