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Cutscenes that crash, or stay black, in Windows games running under CrossOver on Apple Silicon — what causes it, which games are affected, and how to find out about a game that is not listed yet.
The tooling lives in MacGameVideoFix.
They look different and have nothing in common except the symptom.
The crash. Unreal's Electra media player asks every D3D12 resource for
ID3DDestructionNotifier and uses the answer without checking whether it got
one. Apple's D3DMetal does not implement that interface, so the first VP9 frame
dereferences a null vtable and the game dies. H.264 and H.265 can avoid the
buffer pool through a CVar; VPx has no equivalent, so VP9 on D3D12 has no way
out through configuration.
→ Fixed. See Mortal Shell 2.
The black screen. The game reaches the cutscene, shows nothing, and does not crash. Nothing returns an error, so there is no crash log and nothing to grep for — the failure has to be traced through the code.
→ Fixed on DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS, where it turned out to be five separate faults in a row, ending in a frame that decoded correctly and had no way to reach the renderer that draws it.
A third mode has nothing to do with video at all. Both Life is Strange titles run fine and then freeze, anywhere, because Unreal walks the GPU's memory nodes and D3DMetal never tells it to stop. It is listed here because it is the same toolkit, not because it is the same problem.
The thing that matters is what the cutscenes are encoded as and which API plays
them. survey-games.sh reports both for a game folder:
diagnostics/survey-games.sh "/path/to/steamapps/common/<Game>"
Reading the output:
- VP9 + Unreal — the crash. Run the fix.
- VP9 + anything else — possible, but a different mechanism each time.
-
Bink (
.bik/.bk2) — Bink ships its own decoder and never touches Media Foundation or D3D video. Not affected by any of this. - H.264 — normally fine, provided CrossOver is patched with winevideo.
Two caveats on the survey. It reads Unreal .pak indexes but only version 11
unencrypted ones, so a title using anything else reports zero videos when it
may have hundreds. And a game that packs its movies in a proprietary archive is
invisible to it — 0 means "none found loose or in a readable pak", never "no
videos".
| Game | Engine | Symptom | Fix | winevideo | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mortal Shell 2 | Unreal Engine 5.6.1 | Crash on the first cutscene | Runtime patch, 4 sites | No 1 | Fixed |
| Life is Strange: Reunion | Unreal Engine 5 | Freezes after a while, anywhere | DXGI node guard | No | Fixed |
| Life is Strange: Double Exposure | Unreal Engine 5 | Freezes after a while, anywhere | DXGI node guard, same DLL | No | Installed, not yet confirmed in play |
| DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS | Koei Tecmo, in-house | Cutscene runs with sound, picture black | Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12 | Yes | Fixed |
1 Expected rather than measured: VP9 never reaches Media Foundation in that game, but it has not been run on a CrossOver without winevideo.
Every row is a title we deliberately took on, and every claim on the linked page comes from a measurement on an installed copy. Where something was established by reading the executable rather than by playing to the failure, the page says so.
Each row links to a page with the findings and the fix for that title.
- Games — the table above, plus how a row gets added
- Diagnosing a new game — the tools, and what each one answers