Seeing "TV test pattern" where video should be on SteamDeck

I’m making a companion app to run on Windows standalone.

There is a looping video that plays behind my main menu.

This video plays correctly on all versions of Windows I have tried.

However, running this Windows build on a SteamDeck is rendering a test pattern where my video should be.

I have tried it forcing proton 9, proton 8 and proton 7, as well as proton hotfix and proton experimental.

All versions of proton produce the same result, a TV test image pattern, including changing gray static in the lower right corner. Everything else about the app works perfectly. See image.

Has anyone seen something like this? Where is this “signal” coming from? Is it a codec fallback within Unity? Is it a failure of hardware decompression on the device? I haven’t gotten so far as to pull logs or attach debuggers… I’m just curious if anyone has see this before and has any idea what might be happening.

I have tried with Unity6000.27f1 and Unity6000.34f1, both the same result.

The video is an MP4 file and it is being played back with the VideoPlayer Component, rendering to a 4k Render Texture that is shown in a UGUI RawImage component in my menu hierarchy.

This is Proton’s fallback video/audio used when the codec is not supported.

Supposedly Valve monitors how often a file is played across users, transcodes popular files, and then distributes them to Steam Decks. Here one Proton devs explains it:

You can also find the video file here in the Proton source:

Valve recommends using standalone codecs like VP9 or AV1 here (which I guess means not using Media Foundation):
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/steamdeck/proton#4

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This was indeed the problem.

I fixed it by selecting the VP8 codec explicitly (transcode setting in Unity on the video import panel) and the video now shows up correctly.

Thanks Adrian. Really appreciate the laser-focused info!

For future reference, this was the video codec vs build target / OS compatibility matrix, linked from somewhere in those above links:

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