Pinup Popper Theme Studio

PinUP Popper Theme Studio

What it is for

Your Popper frontend looks like whatever media you collected over the years — a background from here, a wheel bar from there, nothing quite matching.

This makes the whole frontend one design, in one go. Your wheels and table videos are untouched.

What it does

You pick a theme and a bar style, tell it your screen sizes, and press Install. It draws everything, encodes the videos, and puts it in place.

No image editor, no video editor, no editing Popper's settings by hand.

What it installs

Background for every screen (1-4 Screens supported cabinet only)— PlayField, BackGlass, DMD, Topper

The wheel bar your games sit on, in the style you picked

An animated intro that plays when Popper starts, on every screen, with sound

30 themes, 40 bar styles, and the bar can sit along the bottom, down the right edge, or curved in an arc.

Before it writes anything

It makes a backup. Your own Popper settings stay as they are. 

I don't have any problems, but it's always good to have your own backup. You should really always have one.

About GPU encoding in this tool

The startup intros, playlist and the background are videos. Every screen gets an clip, and that has to be encoded before it can be installed.

This is the slowest part of the job, and it is where your graphics card does most of the work.

You don't have to choose anything:

The app checks what your machine can do and takes the strongest encoder your card actually runs. It tests it before trusting it — an encoder that is listed but fails is not used.

The Render quality card reports what it found: your card's name, the encoder that will run.

What it looks for, in order:

AV1 — best quality for the file size. Newer NVIDIA, AMD and Intel cards.

HEVC (H.265) — almost as good, supported by most cards from the last several years.

H.264 — works everywhere.

No ffmpeg, or no usable encoder:

The app falls back to encoding in software. Everything still works and the result looks the same — it just takes considerably longer, because the processor is doing what the card would have done.

If the card says "software" and you have a modern GPU, ffmpeg is probably missing or not being found.

How long it takes:

A full install is roughly 5-15 minutes on a machine with hardware encoding. Most of that is the video. CPU very slow.

Examples right edge, bottom and arc:

Theme Overview (gifs):

Playfield:

Backglass, DMD, Topper: