Hi all! Sorry if this has been asked before, but I couldn't seem to find any info on it after looking through this thread and the FAQ:

I'm trying to export animations and images from within the "display" tab of Pinball Browser. I exported ~44 frames from ST 2013, however the file format exported is ".pbi". I can't seem to find any info on this file type anywhere. Could anyone point me towards any info on this file extension? Converting to something like .PNG would be great, but even just info on how the pixel info is stored in this container would be plenty - I'll just be using these files to render animations within my own DMD display software (just a clock/display similar to "RunDMD") so if I knew how to access pixel data in this format, that would be just as good!

Any pointers would be amazing - and thanks to oga83 for your work! I spent hours last night just exploring all the resources packed in the Star Trek 2013 game code - so cool!!

That's kinda what I was guessing. I wonder if oga83 would be willing to provide some info on this file format? Like I mentioned earlier, I don't necessarily need to convert these files to anything, I'd just love to know the way the data is stored so I can extract it (even on a per-pixel basis, every frame) and re-construct it on my DMD.

Thanks for the quick reply, by the way zene10 !

Just gonna document here some interesting finds regarding the container used to store these exported images. Obviously this is all pure speculation, but I'm determined to get to the bottom of this!

I wrote a script to unpack a .pbi file and write each byte as an integer value into an ouput.txt file. The image I'm unpacking is a tiny "0" made of red and black pixels. I figured the result would perhaps be some garbage bytes at the beginning related to the container followed by lots of "0" and "255" values, which could perhaps be byte values within a RGBA tuple (since all the values in this image would be full-red channel, black (0,0,0) and variants of full and zero alpha...

Obviously that assumes the values stored would be byte-aligned, but I figure even if they aren't, some patterns should emerge that indicate where the actual pixel data is stored (since this image has lots of repeating red pixel values).

I guess I'm totally wrong, because the bytes I'm printing are completely random and following seemingly no pattern whatsoever. Perhaps these files are encrypted? perhaps there exists data between each pixel that's not byte-aligned, making it really difficult to find patterns? That seems unlikely since it'd be way harder to pull data from a file if its data wasn't byte aligned...

EDIT: looks my assumption was wrong. I don't think color is stored at all in these .pbi files. Just brightness? Exporting in a different "color" results in the same .pbi file. color must be something applied by Pinball Browser directly