Frontend art (medias/)

medias/ is the folder vPinOps reads to draw the wheel, the playfield backdrop, the backglass and the DMD. The rule comes from Visual Pinball’s own layout document: store frontend media in a medias folder, following the same naming scheme as the table, prefixed by the media type in brackets.

So each file is:

(Type) <same name as the table or folder>.<ext>

(Wheel) Medieval Madness (Williams 1997).png
(Playfield) Medieval Madness (Williams 1997).mp4

The base name follows the same three-step rule as companions, so both of those work inside a correctly-named folder — and inside a folder dedicated to one table, even a bare (Wheel).png is accepted.

A still and a video can share a prefix

Same prefix, different extension. vPinOps uses this deliberately: the selected table plays its video; its neighbours in the wheel show the still.

Why it works that way

Simultaneous video decode across every tile of the wheel is the performance trap that has sunk other front ends. No table’s video is kept alive except the one you are looking at.

The media types

Prefix	What it is
(Wheel)	The circular logo the wheel navigation is built from
(Playfield)	The playfield display — still and/or video
(Backglass)	The backglass display
(DMD)	The dot-matrix display
(FullDMD)	Full-screen DMD variant
(Topper)	Topper display
(RealDMD) / (RealColorDMD)	Media for a physical DMD
(Loading)	Loading video — shown while a table starts up
(GameHelp)	Rule card
(GameInfo)	Game flyer
(Audio) / (AudioLaunch)	Audio when showing or launching a table
(Other)	Anything else

What to use

Still art as .png, video as .mp4. That is what real libraries are made of, and it is what vPinOps is known to show — stills everywhere, and video on macOS and Windows.

vPinOps also recognises .apng .jpg .jpeg .webp .bmp .gif for stills and .m4v .webm .mov .mkv .avi .f4v .wmv for video. Recognised means the scanner picks the file up and puts it in the right slot.

The exact list per platform is coming

Which of those vPinOps can actually show is not yet documented per operating system, and rather than guess, this page names the two safe ones. .png art and .mp4 video is the path least likely to surprise you.

Animated art does not animate

A .gif or .apng is shown as a single still frame — its first. There is no animation anywhere in vPinOps. If you want motion on a surface, it has to be a video.

Video does not play on Linux yet

A surface with a video falls back to its still image, so it is worth having .png art even when you have a video. Where things stand.

Audio is recognised, not played

vPinOps does not play sound. (Audio) and (AudioLaunch) files are found, recorded and counted as filling their slot, and nothing ever plays them — and videos play silently too.

The naming is honoured because Visual Pinball’s layout defines it and your files should survive a move between frontends. But do not expect a sound out of vPinOps today.

Note

This is only about the frontend. Table audio is Visual Pinball’s job and works normally — a table’s own music, its ROM sound, and the AltSound and PuP packs its plugins play.

Where the art comes from

The line is content versus media:

• The playable pieces — the .vpx table, its ROM, its .directb2s backglass — you source yourself. vPinOps will never auto-download or scrape tables, ROMs or backglasses. That scraping is what lets people sell cabinets pre-loaded with the community’s free work, authors uncredited. Table authors give their work away and ask only that people know who made it.
• Frontend media is different. Wheel logos, playfield videos and DMD art are dressing for the front end, not the game — and vpinmediadb exists to supply exactly that. So that is where vPinOps pulls them from.

The media fetch is a separate, optional, re-runnable step. It only fills empty slots and will never overwrite art you placed yourself, and a slow or offline media site can never stop a table importing.

Wherever it can, vPinOps shows who made the table.