CrossOver Support - Community Forums

On Linux, none of the available file explorers seem to provide extensive support for media metadata (i.e. in Details view, showing info like video bitrate, frame size, framerate, etc) - whereas pretty much every one on Windows does. I'm therefore trying to use Directory Opus in Crossover for this purpose.

Getting Opus setup & running in Crossover was very easy, & it's able to show metadata columns for images. However, all metadata columns for videos come out blank. Presumably, it's trying to leverage some underlying Windows dependency that's not available in Crossover by default. My strong suspicion is that this is the Media Feature Pack (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=16546). However, because it's distributed as an MSU (not an MSI or EXE), I can't figure out any way to get it installed into the bottle.

What I've tried:

• I asked the Directory Opus dev, but he basically just said "This is Windows software, we won't answer any questions about WINE."
• I tried updating to Crossover v20 beta, which is based on WINE 5, which does support MSU's (according to https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26757). However, I still couldn't figure out any way to get the Media Feature Pack MSU installed. If I try with "Run Command," it shows "There is no Windows program configured to open this type of file"; if I try Install Software into Bottle, it says the .msu is "of an unknown installer type;" if I run "wusa.exe the.msu," it didn't seem to do anything; if I extract the MSU & try to install the cabs it contains, the installations fail. I tried submitting a ticket to Crossover support, but the response was "It may need some dev attention on this. With this we don’t have a dev on hand to look into issues".
  *As a possible alternative to Media Feature Pack, I tried installing Windows Media Player 9 in the bottle, but the download link that Crossover tries to use to download it is invalid. I also asked Crossover support about this, but their response was just: "this is known not to install, additionally the install file is not longer available from source it's referenced from."

I'm 99% sure what I need is either WMP or Media Feature Pack, but after much trial and error (and hours of googling), I find myself at a dead end. And unfortunately, it seems I'm not able to get any guidance via paid support tickets. If anyone can provide any insight how I might install WMP or Media Feature Pack (or otherwise get video metadata extraction to work in Directory Opus), I'd very much appreciate it.

Thanks in advance :)

I can't help, but I want to second the question - it is amazing how close your question is to what I want to do. I run Freecommander and XYPlorer in crossover rather than DOPUS, and I am trying to get the file previewers to run for media files. At various times in the past this has worked for me, but now I run into exactly the same problem you mention trying to install windows media player 9 or 10 - download links don't work. Surely there is a MSI or installable download somewhere, but I can't seem to find it.

I hope Codeweavers Support will give this a second look. Dolphin has made some strides recently, but as you say the Linux world is largely devoid of File managers which have the flexibility of the windows variety. Just a little effort here to get this working would fill a big void.

If you happen to get this working I hope you will report back as I will be following. I will do the same for you.

I actually tried XYPlorer too, & saw that the behavior was the same - which lends even more credence to the suspicion that the issue isn't the particular app, but a more general Windows dependency that's needed for extracting data from videos.

I'd encourage you to reach out to them directly via ticket too. Hopefully if there's more interest, they'll be willing to have someone try to reproduce it on their end. In the past when I'd submitted tickets, they were super thoughtful & we were able to have some meaningful back-and-forth debugging efforts, but unfortunately in this case it was pretty much "I don't know, and we don't have anyone available to look into this application." Maybe you'll have better luck than me at encouraging them to at least run it once through a debugger :)

Will do. In the meantime, were you able to find a windows media player installable download anywhere? Surely such a thing must be available somewhere.

Looks like this thread may have a link to an installable version of WMP10, but so far I can't get it to install.

I did find one, but wasn't able to get it to install either :/

It looks like Microsoft removed all of the Windows Media Player downloads from their website :/ I found some unofficial ones, but none that I would be confident about sharing officially. I'm going to remove the dead links from the CrossTies. If you do find one that works, please let me know so I can add a working link :)

The .msu failure is interesting since it was fixed in Wine -- nice find :)

Is there a secret to installing an .msu file in Crossover??

I have tried this before and it seems it is not possible yet.

Not that I know of. I was mentioning it because it could be interesting to look into why it is failing in CrossOver.

...Any hope of getting someone to look into this at some point? Been waiting 5 months & still no progress :/

I tried the nightly build of the new Crossover v21 - it now seems to install Windows Media Feature Pack (from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/mediafeaturepack). However, after installing that, file browsers still behave the same: no media columns show any values.

Justin Klein wrote:

I tried the nightly build of the new Crossover v21 - it now seems to
install Windows Media Feature Pack (from
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/mediafeaturepack).
However, after installing that, file browsers still behave the
same: no media columns show any values.

Hi, how does it do that ?