inZOI on Mac – black screen on video due to AAC + workaround

[Alien4042x]

I'm testing inZOI on my Mac mini M4 Pro, and I ran into a weird issue:
The game launches fine, but cutscenes / intro videos show only a black screen.

After some digging, I found this GStreamer error in the logs:
gst_aac_parse_sink_setcaps:<aacparse0> Need codec_data for raw AAC

Here's what I found so far:

• I installed GStreamer via Homebrew (gstreamer, gst-plugins-bad/good/ugly, gst-libav).
• Running gst-launch-1.0 outside of Wine plays the video fine.
• Inside Crossover/Wine, it seems like it doesn't pick up the right codecs or is missing codec_data.
• I came across a workaround where someone re-encoded the video files, which solved the black screen issue – but I’d prefer to avoid modifying game files if possible.

💡 The game itself works well, but this issue with AAC and missing codec data isn't obvious unless you check debug logs.

👉 So here's my question:

• Is there a way to force Wine/Crossover to use the system's GStreamer?
• Or maybe inject the missing codec info some other way?

Would really appreciate any input. Posting this as both a bug discussion and to help anyone else running into black screen issues.

Thanks 🙏

[italomandara]

CXPatcher patches crossover to use the system GStreamer you installed, But you need to make sure you have GStreamer framework in your system's framework folder, I suggest trying to use the GStreamer MacOS installer instead of brew, probably your installation got into another folder but still works on macos smh?

[Alien4042x]

OK thank you for reply.
One more thing -
I noticed that in some games or launchers , there's a weird behavior with mscoree.dll not being loaded correctly.
Here's a trace from Wine debug:

trace:module:LdrGetDllHandleEx flags 0x1, load_path 0000000000000000, dll_characteristics 0000000000000000, name 000000000011FEE0, base 000000000011FED8.
trace:module:find_dll_file Skipping file search for L"mscoree.dll".
trace:module:LdrGetDllHandleEx L"mscoree" -> 0000000000000000 (load path (null))
trace:module:LdrShutdownProcess ()

Yet mscoree.dll is present in the system32 directory inside the bottle, and other games like Grounded don’t have this issue, even in the same bottle.
Do you have any idea why this happens or what might be causing this? Could it be related to Wine Mono not being installed or registered properly?

Thanks a lot!

[italomandara]

It needs some investigation.
If the problem is wine mono, you can try and install the latest .net from crossover and see what happens. (install it in a new bottle just in case so that you can delete it afterwards)