# Launch Backgrounds

When you launch a game, PinballY normally displays a series of status messages ("Loading game", "Running", etc) in the main playfield window, drawn with a plain gray background. If you prefer, you can replace the gray background with a custom image or video, simply by dropping an image or video file into one of the Media subfolders, as outlined below.

If you use a PNG image that's completely transparent as the custom background image, it'll have the effect of making PinballY continue to show the current table's background video or image while the game loads. The gray background that PinballY shows by default is actually superimposed in front of the table background, so substituting a transparent image will allow the table background to remain visible through the loading process. For your convenience, the PinballY distribution includes a simple transparent PNG file, called Transparent.png, located in the main Media folder. To use it as a transparent background for the launch screen, you can simply copy this file into the Media > Images folder and rename it as shown below.

PNG images can also be partially transparent or translucent, so you can use this feature to superimpose images on top of the table background.

Using a custom background image or video is a simple way to achieve some simple effects, but you can do much more extensive customizations to the launch screens using Javascript. See Seamless Game Launch in the Worked Examples section for some examples.

## Folder location

Custom background images go in the Images folder within your main Media folder.

Custom background videos go in the Videos folder within your main Media folder.

See Media folder location for more on where that folder is located.

A video file takes precedence. If you supply both a custom video file and a custom image, the video will be displayed and the image will be ignored.

## File names

The filename for a custom launch video or image is always Game Launch Background.ext, where .ext is one of the standard image file or video file extensions.

## File types

For image files, the extension can be any of the standard image file suffixes: .png, .apng, .jpg, .jpeg, or .gif.

For video files, the extension .ext can be any of the supported video file suffixes: .mpg, .f4v, .mkv, .wmv, .m4v, or .avi.