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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.

The two failure modes

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.

Is my game affected?

The thing that matters is what the cutscenes are encoded as, what box they are in, and which API plays them. survey-games.sh reports all three for a game folder:

diagnostics/survey-games.sh "/path/to/steamapps/common/<Game>"

Reading the output:

• VP9 + Unreal — likely the crash, but confirm it before patching. No static scanner for Electra's 12000 version check ships here: the code that knows the pattern is the runtime patch itself, which reports how many sites it found once it is installed. A count of zero means this bug is not present in that build, whatever else may be wrong. See Diagnosing a new game.
• 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 — decoded by CrossOver on its own, on stable and on Preview, with nothing patched. A working decoder is not the whole story: Beast of Reincarnation decodes H.264 and still showed nothing, because CrossOver withholds NV12 from the format list on macOS and Electra accepts nothing else. If the sound plays and the picture does not, start at Beast of Reincarnation.

The container is worth as much as the codec. The codec says whether anything can decode the file; the container says whether anything can open it, and on stable CrossOver that is where WebM stops — see Games.

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".

Games

Game	Engine	Symptom	Fix	Backend	DX	CrossOver	Status
Mortal Shell 2	Unreal Engine 5.6.1	Crash on the first cutscene	Runtime patch, 4 sites	D3DMetal	12	26.3 · Preview	Fixed
Life is Strange: Reunion	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard	D3DMetal	12	Preview -- 26.3 crashes	Fixed
Life is Strange: Double Exposure	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard, same DLL	D3DMetal	12	Preview -- 26.3 crashes	Fixed
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12	D3DMetal	12	Preview -- crashes on 26.3	Fixed
Beast of Reincarnation	Unreal Engine 5	Startup video plays with sound, no picture	NV12 restored, Electra forced to software	D3DMetal	12	26.3 · Preview	Fixed
Persona 5 Strikers	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Video never starts; sound only	Staged VC-1 codec, and a D3D9 to D3D11 bridge	DXMT	11	26.3 and Preview	Fixed

Backend and DX are not preferences, they are requirements. Persona 5 Strikers only works on DXMT: it needs a shared D3D9 surface handle, and DXMT implements sharing where D3DMetal has none to build on. The other five run on D3DMetal with the D3D12 renderer, which is also what keeps PSO precompilation -- -dx11 dodges some of these faults and costs permanent shader-compilation stutter.

Which CrossOver, and what "Preview" means. Every measurement here was taken against CrossOver 26.3 and crossover-preview-arm64-20260821, and the CrossOver column says which of the two a title was measured on rather than which it might work on. Everything runs on that Preview. Two are confirmed on 26.3 as well. Both Life is Strange titles freeze on 26.3, and the fix is not what does it: removing it entirely and running again freezes the same way. What differs is D3DMetal -- 3.0 on 26.3 against 4.0b2 on that Preview. Persona 5 Strikers plays on both, which is what its fix predicted: it stages its own decoder, so what CrossOver ships stops mattering. A first attempt on 26.3 failed and was recorded as the title not working there -- wrongly. The staged codec is built against one CrossOver and is not usable under another, and none had been built for 26.3 yet. DYNASTY WARRIORS crashes there too; that much was run, while the reason given for it is read from the two installs' plugin sets rather than from watching it fail.

None of these games needs CrossOver patched, wherever the container can be opened. That was not true when this project started, and it is the single biggest thing that changed. The qualifier is the whole of what remains, and it is a container question rather than a codec one.

Both builds decode VP9 the same way; what only Preview can do is open a WebM, which is the whole of the difference. DYNASTY WARRIORS ships 355 .webm cutscenes and cannot get as far as decoding on stable, while Mortal Shell 2 ships the same codec in .mp4, which both builds handle. The plugin-by-plugin comparison the conclusion rests on is in Findings, under The container, not the codec.

Persona 5 Strikers is the one title needing a codec no CrossOver ships -- VC-1 -- and that is staged beside it rather than patched into it.

None of these fixes decodes anything. The frames existed all along; they were being crashed on, mislabelled, or thrown away.

Every row is a title we deliberately took on, and every claim on the linked page comes from a measurement on an installed copy.

Each row links to a page with the findings and the fix for that title.

Pages

• Games — the table above, what each fix needs from CrossOver, and how a row gets added
• Diagnosing a new game — the tools, and what each one answers
• Findings — what the six have in common: root causes, the vtable slots each hook takes, the carrier DLLs, the container-versus-codec comparison, the open defect on 26.3, and what was tried and did not work. These pages hold the per-title findings; that one holds what is shared.
• Running the scripts directly — for working from a clone: reproducing a fix by hand, or building a proxy for a title that has none. Nothing here is needed to use a release.