GloriousEggroll Drops GE-Proton11-1 With Massive Video Playback Rework and Proton 11 Rebase
The community fork just rebased itself onto Proton 11 bleeding-edge and completely gutted GStreamer from the Wine codebase. GE-Proton11-1 is live today, and the dev finally finished the video playback overhaul that took four months to build. If you run games through Steam Proton or the Steam Runtime, you’ll want to test this build sooner rather than later.
I’ve been tracking the GE-Proton release schedule for a while now. The gap between March and June felt unusually long, but the release notes make it clear why. The entire directShow video pipeline got rebuilt from the ground up. GE used to route media through quartz to gstreamer. That path was notoriously brittle, especially across X11 and Wayland. GStreamer split into half a dozen independent libraries, each with its own surface display quirks. It didn’t make sense to maintain two media backends that do the exact same thing. Now GE just routes quartz through winedmo and FFmpeg. It’s deterministic. It’s cleaner. And it strips out a massive chunk of legacy bloat.
The Pipeline Gets a Clean Sweep
Here’s where the process gets interesting. The dev didn’t rewrite the code manually. An AI agent compared working protonfix logs against broken ones, identifying missing native code paths and patching them directly into Wine. You might be wondering how reliable that approach is, or whether it’ll make it into official Proton. CodeWeavers explicitly rejects AI-generated code, so this won’t be upstreamable. It’s a clever workaround for a maintenance headache, though. The dev also had to personally buy dozens of games to verify video playback. Hardware and game licenses don’t buy themselves.
The build brings a handful of new environment variables to toggle features that might otherwise break your install. PROTON_USE_D7VK=1 brings back d3d12 support, though it’s off by default. PROTON_DISCORD_BRIDGE=1 and PROTON_USE_OPTISCALER=1 are also opt-in. Audio gets some attention too. You can now force channel counts with WINEALSA_CHANNELS or enable spatial downmix with WINEALSA_SPACIAL=1. Keep in mind that these toggles are strictly manual. You have to edit your config files or launch options to activate them.
For Wayland users, xrandr got baked into the build, so auto-detection of the default monitor actually works without host dependency. The dynamic relocation fix for Final Fantasy XIV should finally stop those low address space crashes that left plugins hanging. GE also rolled out a wine-native rsx3d library, which means older titles like Tex Murphy no longer need third-party winetricks hacks to run. Not cheap. That’s a lot of infrastructure to stabilize in one release.
What Actually Works Now
The test list is massive. Nearly eighty titles now play video files without any winetricks, dll overrides, or external codecs. That includes Resident Evil 2 through 8, the entire Persona series, several Atelier games, and a bunch of visual novels that used to break on launch. The dev explicitly removed the protonfix overrides that were previously required. You get clean prefixes. You get fewer moving parts.
Some older WMV videos start pixelated or distorted before correcting themselves. Ghosts N’ Goblins Resurrection and WRC 4 show it most clearly. It’s annoying, but it’s a known limitation of the new pipeline rather than a broken implementation. The dev flagged these specifically so you know what to expect. If a game you play has video that is not playing, open a GE-Proton issue. Keep the logs handy. It’ll save everyone time.
It’s a rather aggressive rework for a community fork, but the math checks out. Stripping GStreamer removes a maintenance nightmare and gives developers a single, stable media path to target. The tradeoff is that you’re running a forked, bleeding-edge build with AI-assisted patches that won’t hit official Proton. If you value stability over the latest features, stick to Steam Runtime. If you want video playback that actually works in legacy DirectShow games without juggling winetricks, this is the build to grab.
You can grab GE-Proton11-1 through Steam’s Proton Experimental branch or pull the tarball directly from the GloriousEggroll GitHub repository below. The dev wants bug reports for any games that still fail to play video, so open an issue if you hit a wall. Head here to install the build. Start testing your library. The long wait is over.
Release GE-Proton11-1 Released
The long awaited video rework and Proton 11 rebase is finally done! GE-Proton11-1 is now available! Proton updates: d7vk added (not enabled by default). Use PROTON_USE_D7VK=1 to enable.
Release GE-Proton11-1 Released · GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom
