Hey Tom and non-Sara programmer. It appears the game not recognizing IV50 codec is a bug in Wine's msvfw32. When tracing this in Wine I see Wine is receiving ICInfo() & ICOpen() calls with the fccType set to 0. Actually, just looking at MSDN right now I see that should match any/all compressor types. Wine does not handle that. Assigning fccType to 0x63646976 (vidc) allows Wine to match the fccType & fccHandler and load the codec.
The logo video will then play. If in a broken & too large fashion. Likely another Wine bug. Still progress.
I will go and report the fccType all Wine bug. Better than having you guys trying to code in Wine workarounds all the time.

Also, I thought of another possibly workaround to try.

One of the Wine devs has a pending patch which fixes the codec detection. (Thanks Zebediah!) Also, my analysis was wrong. :p It was already handling zero, but "ICInfo() wasn't returning a proper type fourcc". The patch seems to have missed the Friday review cutoff.
He's also started to look into the messed up video playback. Not sure if that one will be so straightforward of a fix.

In the meantime I was able to get it all working. The caveat being I've only ran around their house for a bit. Using a 32-bit prefix with Wine 3.1, winetricks -q dsound icodecs and native msvfw32.dll (XP SP3). Replaced the existing msvfw32.dll in c:\windows\system32 with the XP one and added its override, msvfw32, set to native. Not necessarily ideal if msvfw32.dll isn't included in any of the MS redistribs, but simple enough if you have an old Windows' install laying around.

Just want to say thx for looking into this, that's great info!

Good news on this. He has a preliminary patch which completely fixes the video playback. Hopefully it will be submitted soon.

I've often found it useful to report Wine bugs as a number of them have then been fixed. I have actually gotten video playback working in all the other XSEED games I've tried in Wine. I didn't see why this game should be different even if it had me concerned there for a minute.

I gave it a try today and yes, replacing msvfw32.dll in system32 folder then set config to use native msvfw32 definitely worked. Both logo and opening video plays.

By the way, since it's just a minor bug in implementation, using Wine 3.x is not required, stable 2.x build works just fine.

This is fixed now, videos playback properly, with Wine 3.14. You still need winetricks -q dsound icodecs for the Indeo 5 codec & native dsound for working sound in the videos.

I had one difficulty with the game but managed to find a solution (and felt stupid when it turned out to be so simple). I thought I would post here in case anyone else had the same problem and didn't immediately recognize the solution.

I'm using a 32-bit Wine prefix and Windows XP mode. This might not all be necessary, but it seems wise given how old the game and the dependencies are. Use winetricks to install dsound and icodecs, and it should work fine.

Installing the Indeo codecs using winetricks can run into a problem. While installing, if the standard installation is chosen, it might hang up while searching for instances of Netscape. My hard drive is large (10TB) and full of files, and I think it tried to search the entire drive and got stuck as a result. It turns out that this is easily solved by choosing a custom installation and turning off the browser plugin. It came up with a registry error in the process, but the game seems to be able to find the codecs anyway, so that error can be ignored.

When first running the game, it will come up in a window. Note that under "options" it is possible to change it to full screen mode.

I'm using Wine 5.4, and it works fine, so nothing seems to have gone wrong since the previous posts were made in this thread.