Games Running on Proton when OS & Games are installed onto a USB Stick

[RavingGrob]

System Information

• GPU: RX 5600XT
• Driver/LLVM version: Mesa 23.0.3
• Kernel version: 6.1.37
• Link to full system information report as Gist:
• Proton version: Any, but report on 8.0-2d

Symptoms

Proton cannot load videos in game when the OS and Games are both installed on a USB Stick.

Reproduction

So far based on my testing, it's distro agnostic, wayland/x11 agnostic, and proton version agnostic, video filetype agnostic.

Games that are installed on a HDD and mounted to the USB stick play normally. Likewise, games that are installed on the USB but played on the HDD's OS also play fine.

Tested with both NixOS and Nobara on the USB stick.

While admittedly a niche issue, I did want to bring light to it as I've not seen any mention of such a bug, which isn't game specific as I learned after my initial report.

steam-367500.log

Originally posted by @RavingGrob in #1235 (comment)

[kisak-valve]

Hello @RavingGrob, we're using one issue report per unofficially supported game title. Closing as a duplicate of #1235 (comment).

[RavingGrob]

I'm confused, am I supposed to report this on every game I come across? This isn't game specific, like I mentioned in the post above, I had reported it originally on Dragon's Dogma because I didn't yet realize it was more general in scope.

[kisak-valve]

You didn't add any additional details to clearly communicate that. In any case, it's likely you don't have Steam's shader pre-cache subsystem enabled, which also brings in transcoded videos. (There's ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#9132 tracking a request for that to be handled separately.)

[RavingGrob]

You didn't add any additional details to clearly communicate that. In any case, it's likely you don't have Steam's shader pre-cache subsystem enabled, which also brings in transcoded videos. (There's ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#9132 tracking a request for that to be handled separately.)

If I had to let shaders compile, is that not the same thing? I absolutely did let them compile.

[RavingGrob]

"While admittedly a niche issue, I did want to bring light to it as I've not seen any mention of such a bug, which isn't game specific as I learned after my initial report."

[AJuujarvi]

@RavingGrob This seems odd and interesting. Can you try something for me? Can you run the game, and then find its pid via ps x. From there, can you run cat /proc/(Insert PID without parenthesis here)/environ | tr '\0' '\n'. Can you give us what the output of that is in a gist?

After running the above, you should see STEAM_COMPAT_TRANSCODED_MEDIA_PATH=... in the output. Can you check what's in that directory? I'm especially interested in a file named transcoded_video.foz and its size

[RavingGrob]

PID Output Gist

For clairity's sake this is for the game SCP: 5k, which also experienced the same issue

[RavingGrob]

@AJuujarvi I'm not sure what the size of the foz file is supposed to be, but I imagine that it wouldn't be too far off that?

[AJuujarvi]

@AJuujarvi I'm not sure what the size of the foz file is supposed to be, but I imagine that it wouldn't be too far off that?

That's the size of the video when I have the game downloaded as well, so that looks accurate. I have this on my docket to look more into, but because it is a bit odd since nothing looks wrong in your gists or logs at a glance it could take a bit before I have anything or before Devs have anything after looking at it.

Shot in the dark here, could you try a different USB port to boot the USB stick from? If you are on a Desktop, ideally one on the Motherboard itself and not on the front I/O.

Does this happen with multiple USB sticks? If you have the option, does it happen with an external drive connected via USB that has your linux distro installed?

[ivyl]

It's very weird. The path that Steam passes to Proton look correct. The file is there and should be good. I'm currently at loss here.

Logs (failing and successful) captured with PROTON_LOG=+mfplat,+quartz GST_DEBUG=WINE:9,protonvideoconverter:9,4 %command% . Thanks in advance!

[RavingGrob]

At this time, I'm suddenly having great difficulty reproducing the issue on any game other than DD:DA, which is really throwing me for a loop.