Bink Movies not found when “Use Zen Server as cooked output store” is enabled

Development Platform & Builds
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1

Hey everyone,

I’ve encountered an issue with Bink Media Player when “Use Zen Server as cooked output store” is enabled in Unreal Engine 5.6.1.

When Zen Server is used, the Movies folder is not physically present in the packaged build directory.
Because of this, the Bink plugin fails to locate .bk2 movie files, as it attempts to access them through a physical file path instead of through the VFS.
In result, Bink movies cannot be played in packaged builds when Zen Server is active.

Steps to reproduce

  1. Open Project Settings → Packaging.

  2. Enable “Use Zen Server as cooked output store”

  3. Package the project.

  4. Run the packaged build - the Bink player will fail to load the .bk2 file (missing file or open failure).

  5. Disabling the Zen Server option and repackaging resolves the problem immediately.

Is there an official or recommended way to make Bink Media Player compatible with Zen Server in Unreal 5.6?
Or are there any plans to update the plugin to support playing videos directly from .pak files without copying them to a temporary location?

Thanks in advance!

2

Yeah, Bink does it’s own IO completely, so you have to deploy those at least once. I wouldn’t recommend setting up Bink to stream from Zen - we would saturate the network connection completely.