Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Mathias Kowoll edited this page Aug 22, 2026 · 33 revisions

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 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".

Games

Game Engine Symptom Fix Backend DX Status
Mortal Shell 2 Unreal Engine 5.6.1 Crash on the first cutscene Runtime patch, 4 sites D3DMetal 12 Fixed
Life is Strange: Reunion Unreal Engine 5 Freezes after a while, anywhere DXGI node guard D3DMetal 12 Fixed
Life is Strange: Double Exposure Unreal Engine 5 Freezes after a while, anywhere DXGI node guard, same DLL D3DMetal 12 Fixed
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS Koei Tecmo, in-house Cutscene runs with sound, picture black Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12 D3DMetal 12 Fixed
Beast of Reincarnation Unreal Engine 5 Startup video plays with sound, no picture NV12 restored, Electra forced to software D3DMetal 12 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 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.

None of these games needs CrossOver patched. That was not true when this project started, and it is the single biggest thing that changed: CrossOver Preview decodes VP9 profile 0 and 2, H.264 and AAC on its own. Persona 5 Strikers needs a VC-1 decoder CrossOver does not ship, 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

Clone this wiki locally