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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.

Which CrossOver, and whose

By default the app does not modify the CrossOver you installed. It makes a copy, at your direction, and patches the copy — the media libraries, the codecs, and the Game Porting Toolkit if you ask for it. On that route the original stays as CodeWeavers shipped it, so a support question about an engine we changed is never a question about theirs. With the copy turned off in Set up, a toolkit you ask for goes into the CrossOver you installed instead.

The supported engine is stable CrossOver 26.3.0.39832, and nothing else. That is what the winegstreamer pair in the app was built against, and install-engine-media.sh refuses any other version rather than installing onto a wine it was not compiled for. The refusal comes after the copy has been made, so it leaves an unfinished bundle in ~/Applications rather than a working copy.

CrossOver Preview is not supported. It was the engine everything here was measured on for a long time, and it was dropped rather than half-supported: only titles patched without winegstreamer could have worked on it. The notes below that say what it did are kept as history, because a deleted measurement is not a correction. None of them is guidance about where to run a game.

The CrossOver column below says what each title was measured on, and it is the same answer on every row: stable 26.3, on an engine carrying this project's winegstreamer. The GPTK column says which toolkit, and the Motor column what the engine itself had to carry.

The tooling lives in MacGameVideoFix.

Controllers are a separate story with its own page: Controllers — what a PlayStation pad does by default, which per-title switch belongs to which kind of game, and what was measured on each.

The 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.

The buffer, rather than the codec. The frame arrives, and the game asks it for IMF2DBuffer2 — a view with a stride, which is the shape it reads. Wine's media source hands out a plain 1-D memory buffer, which answers E_NOINTERFACE; the game does not look at that answer and dereferences the null it was given. Nothing is wrong with the decoder, and nothing installed beside the game can reach this: the buffer is made inside the engine, so that is where it is fixed.

→ Fixed. See METAL GEAR SOLID: Peace Walker.

A fourth 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, 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 a CrossOver as CodeWeavers ships it that is where WebM stops: 26.3 carries no Matroska demuxer, so one has to be supplied — 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	GPTK	Motor	CrossOver	Status
METAL GEAR SOLID: Peace Walker	Konami, Master Collection	Dies the moment a pre-rendered cutscene starts	Engine patch mgvf-0001: 2D-capable buffers from the media source	D3DMetal	11	not measured -- the engine was the variable	Ours	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed -- crash cured; a green band in some cutscenes is unexplained
Mortal Shell 2	Unreal Engine 5.6.1	Crash on the first cutscene	Runtime patch, 4 sites	D3DMetal	12	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Life is Strange: Reunion	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2 only -- 3.0 crashes it	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Runaway node walk stopped; no freeze-free session recorded
Life is Strange: Double Exposure	Unreal Engine 5	Freezes after a while, anywhere	DXGI node guard, same DLL	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2 only -- 3.0 crashes it	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Guard installs; the freeze was never reproduced or cured
DYNASTY WARRIORS: ORIGINS	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	Video bridge, D3D11 to D3D12	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock†	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Beast of Reincarnation	Unreal Engine 5	Startup video plays with sound, no picture	Console variable found by name; software path from engine patch 0006; needs winevideo	D3DMetal	12	not measured	winevideo	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Persona 5 Strikers	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Video never starts; sound only	Its own VC-1 and WMA Pro reader, and a D3D9 to D3D11 bridge	DXMT	11	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
NINJA GAIDEN 3: Razor's Edge	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Will not start: "Insufficient VRAM"	d9vk, and winevideo's DirectShow filters	DXVK	9	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Starts, 60 fps, in-game cutscenes; the boot movie freezes, one click skips it
Nioh	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene refuses to play, then crashes	Its own WMV3 reader for DirectShow, and the same D3D9 to D3D11 bridge	DXMT	11	4.0b2	Stock†	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Nioh 2	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene refuses to play, then crashes	The same bridge as Nioh; its own WMV3 reader on Media Foundation	DXMT	11	4.0b2	Stock†	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Nioh 3	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Failed to play movie	The DYNASTY WARRIORS bridge, with ordinal hooking added for this title	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock†	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture black	The DYNASTY WARRIORS bridge, with ordinal hooking	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock†	26.3, our winegstreamer	Bridge installs; picture measured only on a patched engine
NieR Replicant ver.1.22474487139	Toylogic, in-house	Crashes when the first video starts	Software decode, and the frame written into the game's target	D3DMetal	11	4.0b2	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
KINGDOM HEARTS Dream Drop Distance	Square Enix, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture solid green; a crash dialog on leaving	Software decode with the planes written into the game's own textures, and the shutdown fault swallowed	D3DMetal	11 + 12	not measured	Stock†	26.3, our winegstreamer	Picture restored; the exit dialog was measured on 1.5+2.5
KINGDOM HEARTS 0.2 Birth by Sleep	Unreal Engine 4	Would not start from a launcher; ran fine launched by hand	None from us. The launcher had to declare microphone use -- see the page	D3DMetal	11	not measured	None	26.3, our winegstreamer	Works with nothing of ours -- fixed in the launcher
KINGDOM HEARTS HD 1.5+2.5 ReMIX	Square Enix, in-house	Cutscene runs with sound, picture solid green; a crash dialog on leaving	The Dream Drop Distance fix, unchanged -- six executables, same route	D3DMetal	11 + 12	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
TMNT: Splintered Fate	Rebirth, in-house	Opens a window, then closes silently	A guard on the D3D12 call that ends the process instead of failing	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Tormented Souls 2	Unreal Engine 5	Fatal error before the first frame	16:9 modes added to a list that offered none	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
Devil May Cry 5	RE Engine	Crashes when a skill preview video plays	Its own VC-1 reader, handed what Media Foundation refuses	D3DMetal	12	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
RESIDENT EVIL 2	RE Engine	Crashes when a video plays	The same reader as Devil May Cry 5, on its own build of the proxy	D3DMetal	12	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
RESIDENT EVIL 3	RE Engine	Crashes when a video plays	The same reader and proxy as RESIDENT EVIL 2	D3DMetal	12	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
NINJA GAIDEN 4	Koei Tecmo, in-house	Says the VP9 codec is missing, then exits	Staged Matroska demuxer, and the MFT gate answered	D3DMetal	12	3.0, or 4.0b3 with the fence repair this fix carries -- on 4.0b2 without it nothing is ever presented; 4.0b2 with it was not run	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Fixed
RESONANCE: A PLAGUE TALE LEGACY	Asobo, in-house	Fatal error: Shader Model 6.7 is not supported	Shader model floor lowered in memory; HDR10 off in ENGINESETTINGS	D3DMetal	12	not measured	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Plays at the desktop resolution with HDR10 off -- its cutscenes have never been visible
CONTROL Resonant	Northlight, Remedy in-house	Windows light up in flat violet, cyan and yellow	The window-interior shader kept from drawing; Metal 4 off	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Plays with Metal 4 off; lit rooms behind windows show as dark glass
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt	REDengine 3	Black screen at start; DLSS said to be unsupported	The stream-output pipeline refused; Streamline's Wine check answered	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock	26.3, our winegstreamer	Reaches the menu and plays; DLSS works, frame generation does not. Ray tracing stays off since the game's 2026-10-08 update: one of its ray-tracing shaders uses a 64-bit atomic compare-exchange that Metal refuses to compile (measured on an M4 Max)
Marvel's Spider-Man 2	Insomniac, in-house	Characters stay in a T-pose; the symbiote breaks; brief black blocks in the sandstorm	macprotips' raw views for the 2 GB mesh pool, and a barrier after the fog copy	D3DMetal	12	4.0b2	Stock	Preview 27, through NotProton	Fixed -- T-pose and symbiote; the black blocks were not seen again in a session with the barrier
God of War	Santa Monica, in-house	White specks on characters in dim light	The EQUAL depth test after the prepass created as GREATER_EQUAL	DXMT	11	not measured	Stock	Preview 27, through NotProton	Fixed under Rosetta and under FEX; D3DMetal not measured

One engine, and update its toolkit. The supported engine is stable CrossOver 26.3.0.39832 and nothing else: the winegstreamer pair this project ships was built against that engine, and install-engine-media.sh refuses any other version rather than installing onto a wine it was not compiled for. Every fix here was written against Apple's Game Porting Toolkit 4.0b2, which 26.3 does not ship -- it carries D3DMetal 3.0, and on 3.0 these patches do not find what they were written to find. So 26.3 is a perfectly good engine for all of this once its toolkit is replaced, and a poor one until then. The app does the replacing in a copy of the CrossOver you point it at, and keeps both halves of the original inside that copy, so on that route the CrossOver you installed is not touched. With the copy turned off in Set up, a toolkit you ask for goes into the CrossOver you installed instead, and the app says so where that choice is made.

The exception is NINJA GAIDEN 4, which was the other way round: measured working on 3.0, and on 4.0b2 its cutscene played its audio and no picture appeared. Where the frames stopped is now established -- two D3DMetal 4 fence faults, which the title's fix repairs since 2026-10-14 -- and with that repair it renders on 4.0b3, Metal 4 on and off.

The GPTK column is the one that decides. Apple's Game Porting Toolkit is what actually draws these games, and CrossOver ships it inside the bundle rather than as something you pick: 26.3 carries D3DMetal 3.0. A launcher can put another generation in front of it -- RaccoonBot carries d3dMetal3 and d3dMetal4 side by side and injects one at launch -- and that is how the rows needing 4.0b2 run on this engine. So "this only works on the Preview build" meant, for three of the rows here, "this needs the newer toolkit" and nothing about Wine at all -- which is why dropping Preview costs the table nothing.

Those three rows in bold are where that stops being a footnote, and they fall into two camps pointing opposite ways. NINJA GAIDEN 4 is measured working on 3.0, and on 4.0b2 without its fence repair nothing is ever presented -- the game runs blind while every Present succeeds; with the repair it renders on 4.0b3. Life is Strange -- both packages -- runs on 4.0b2 and crashes on 3.0. Opposite requirements, same machine, so there is no single toolkit that serves the whole table. Both were measured by moving the toolkit under a fixed CrossOver, which is the only way to separate the two.

Everywhere else the column says "not measured", and that is deliberate. 4.0b2 is what these titles need as a general rule, with NINJA GAIDEN 4 the exception at 3.0 unless its fence repair is in place -- but a rule is not a run, and a row whose toolkit nobody varied has no measurement of its own to report. The cells that used to hold one were derived from the CrossOver build rather than run, and that derivation is gone: a launcher chooses the generation, so the build implies nothing about it.

Backend and DX are not preferences, they are requirements. Persona 5 Strikers, Nioh and Nioh 2 only work on DXMT: all three need a shared D3D9 surface handle, and DXMT implements sharing where D3DMetal has none to build on. Nioh 3, despite the name, belongs with the other group -- it is D3D12 on D3DMetal and never touches D3D9, and NieR Replicant is D3D11 on D3DMetal. The rest 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. Every measurement here was taken on stable CrossOver 26.3, on an engine carrying this project's winegstreamer, except the two rows the next paragraph but one names, and the column says so row by row. Both halves of it are load-bearing: the version is stable 26.3, and the engine carries this project's winegstreamer rather than the one CodeWeavers ships. What a fix needs an engine to carry is a different question, and the Motor column answers it per row.

CrossOver Preview is no longer a supported engine. It was measured against here, and on 2026-08-31 it was dropped rather than half-supported: only titles patched without winegstreamer could have worked on it, and the rest were out of the equation. The findings below that mention it are kept, because they record what was measured and a deleted measurement is not a correction. They are history. None of them is guidance about where to run a game.

Two rows were measured on Preview 27, through NotProton: Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and God of War. Their fixes sit in the game folder and need nothing from the engine, which is exactly the kind of title Preview could always run, so their CrossOver cell names where the runs were made.

The KINGDOM HEARTS 2.8 package holds three entries, not two -- Dream Drop Distance, 0.2 Birth by Sleep and the Back Cover film -- and they do not share a fault. Dream Drop Distance needs the bridge and has it. 0.2 needs nothing at all: no installer here has ever covered it, its executable lives in a subfolder this project does not reach, and launched directly it runs and plays its video, four times out of four.

0.2 would not start from a launcher because the launcher declared no microphone use. Steam initialises voice detection at startup; without NSMicrophoneUsageDescription macOS can neither prompt nor grant, the request never resolves, and Steam's own main loop wedges -- its assertion says so. A stalled Steam never answers the second request this package makes of it, which is why no ordinary title showed the same fault. Declaring the permission fixed it, and fixes any title that touches the microphone.

Its status says Fixed because this column answers "does the title work", and it does. Its Fix column says "none needed", and that is the half to read before concluding anything was shipped for it: nothing was. Every other Fixed row in this table names something this project installs; this one names nothing.

History: NINJA GAIDEN 4 and Beast of Reincarnation were both measured stalling on Preview, and both were recorded working on 26.3, which is the opposite direction to the one this project expected. NINJA GAIDEN 4 stalled there before any video call, with no thread in it touching D3D12, DXGI, Media Foundation or winegstreamer, and what held it was never established. Beast of Reincarnation stalled there as well, and carries a separate requirement of its own: it needs winevideo since the game update of 2026-08-24. The shared lesson is that "runs on Preview" was never the safe assumption this project began with.

Two lessons paid for by rows that were wrong for a while, and are worth more than the statuses they corrected:

• A staged codec is built against one CrossOver and is not usable under another. Persona 5 Strikers was recorded as not working on 26.3 after a first attempt failed there; the codec simply had not been built for 26.3 yet.
• A fix that reports itself installed is not necessarily loaded. NieR Replicant was recorded as Preview-only because its 26.3 runs died at the first video. The bridge was never executing in those runs: the registry override it depends on had gone missing, and the installer answered installed from the files alone.

The Motor column says what the engine itself has to carry, and for most rows it is nothing. Those ask nothing of ours from the engine: the fix sits beside the game and, where the video needs one, a plugin goes in front of it. That was not true when this project started, and it is the single biggest thing that changed. The exceptions are the rows that name something instead: Beast of Reincarnation needs a winegstreamer carrying winevideo's patches, and METAL GEAR SOLID: Peace Walker is the first title here whose whole fix is an engine patch of ours, with nothing installed beside the game at all -- it was tried on a stable 26.3 as CodeWeavers ships it and could not play its cutscenes there, which is the measurement that puts Ours in its cell.

A dagger on "Stock" means inferred rather than run. No run on those rows isolated the engine's own winegstreamer as the thing that carried the video, so Stock there is read off the mechanism rather than established. That is not a smaller claim than Stock; it is an untested one, and the column says which rows it applies to. It is not a statement about the CrossOver cell beside it. That cell records what the runs were made on -- stable 26.3 with this project's winegstreamer in the engine, on all but two rows -- and Motor records what a fix needs an engine to carry. A row reading Stock in one and our winegstreamer in the other is not two claims in contradiction: the runs were made on the engine this project supports, and Stock says the fix does not depend on it.

History, and the finding that closed a gap. Both builds decoded VP9 the same way, and for a long time what only Preview could do was open a WebM -- which was the whole of the difference. DYNASTY WARRIORS ships 355 .webm cutscenes and could not get as far as decoding on stable, while Mortal Shell 2 ships the same codec in .mp4, which both builds handled. The plugin-by-plugin comparison that conclusion rested on is in Findings, under The container, not the codec.

That gap is closed, and it was a missing plugin rather than a missing engine. Stable 26.3 ships libgstmatroska for neither architecture and the Preview build shipped it for both -- so the difference between them on a WebM was one plugin the whole time. Staging it beside the decoder gives 26.3 one too, and NINJA GAIDEN 4 is where that was measured: it plays on stock 26.3, video and all, with nothing patched into CrossOver.

Several titles need a codec no CrossOver ships -- VC-1, WMV3, WMV2 or WMA -- and where it comes from depends on the engine. On a stock CrossOver the plugin is staged from a GStreamer runtime you installed, one staging per engine, with the bottle pointed at it; on an engine copy this project makes, the same plugins are already inside the engine's own lib64/gstreamer-1.0 and nothing is staged at all. Neither route patches a decoder into a CrossOver you installed. Which titles, and which plugin each one needs, is the Codec column of what each title actually loads; the count is derived there rather than repeated here, because the number written here was three for as long as it took two more titles to join the list. Nioh 3 needs none: its video is already NV12 by the time Media Foundation is asked for 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 they 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.
• What ships, and where it goes — every binary this project produces or redistributes, where each one belongs, and what a launcher has to copy to work on another machine.