ICO to VOB Converter

Convert ICO to VOB Online

A VOB is the video object file that lives inside a DVD's VIDEO_TS folder — an MPEG-2 program stream, not an image container. Feeding it a Windows ICO therefore produces a short, silent video clip that holds your icon on screen for a set number of seconds. That is a reasonable thing to want if you are building a DVD-menu asset or testing a disc-authoring pipeline, but if you simply want the icon as a picture, ICO to PNG is the conversion you are actually looking for.

ICO Format at a Glance

VOB Format at a Glance

How to Convert ICO to VOB

1. Upload Your ICO File: Drag the icon onto the page or click "+ Add Files" to browse for it. You can queue several icons and convert them with one set of settings.
2. Set Duration and Merge Strategy: The Duration dropdown decides how long the still is held, from a single frame up to 10 seconds per frame, with 5 seconds per frame preselected. Merge strategy defaults to "Merge images", which chains a batch into one clip; switch it to "Video per image" to get a separate VOB per icon.
3. Choose Video Resolution, Background Color and Video Codec: Video resolution starts on "Keep original", so a 48 px icon yields a 48-pixel-tall clip — pick Preset Resolutions or Fixed Resolutions if you need a DVD-shaped frame. Background Color (White by default, with Black and a range of other named colours available) fills the icon's transparent pixels and any bars around it, and Video Codec offers MPEG-2, the DVD-Video codec, plus MPEG-1.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .vob. Files upload over an encrypted connection, are processed on our servers, and are deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

What the Converter Actually Produces

Three things about the output surprise people, and all three follow from the fact that the source is a single still picture.

• It is silent. A still image carries no audio, so no Audio Codec control is offered on this page and the resulting program stream has a video track only. VOB can carry AC-3, LPCM, MP2 or DTS in general; there is simply nothing here to encode.
• It does not move. Still-image sources are encoded at one frame per second, so a 5-second Duration writes five identical frames. Raising the Duration holds the same picture on screen for longer; it never introduces motion.
• It is bigger than you expect. MPEG-2 has no constant-quality mode, so whichever File Compression option you choose resolves to a bitrate, and the encoder enforces a resolution-derived minimum that never falls below 2 Mbps. At that floor a clip costs roughly 250 KB for every second of video, no matter how simple the picture is. For comparison, the same icon as a PNG is usually a few kilobytes.

Practically, that means the Quality Preset dropdown has very little influence on an ICO-to-VOB job. The two settings that genuinely change the output are Duration (length) and Video resolution (frame size, and therefore the enforced minimum bitrate).

Frequently Asked Questions

Will this VOB play in a DVD player?

Not on its own. A set-top DVD player expects a complete VIDEO_TS folder — the VOB files plus the IFO navigation files and their BUP backups — burned to a UDF disc. A standalone .vob from this tool opens fine in VLC or mpv, and can be imported into DVD-authoring software as a source clip, but it is not a finished disc image.

Why is the clip silent, and can I add audio?

Because an icon has no sound to convert. The Audio Codec control that appears on video-to-video conversions is deliberately hidden here, so the output is a video-only program stream. If you need a soundtrack, mux one in afterwards with a desktop tool such as ffmpeg or your DVD-authoring application.

Which image inside a multi-size ICO gets used?

The first one stored in the file's directory — not necessarily the largest. We checked this directly: a three-image ICO written in 16 → 48 → 256 px order decodes as the 16x16 frame, while the same three pictures written 256 → 48 → 16 decode as the 256x256 frame. Because the writing tool controls that order, there is no way to predict it from the file size. If a specific size matters, export that one image to PNG first and convert the PNG instead.

How long is the finished clip?

Exactly as long as the Duration you pick, which defaults to 5 seconds per frame. With several icons queued and Merge strategy on "Merge images", the total is the number of icons multiplied by the per-image duration, so six icons at 3 seconds each give an 18-second clip.

Why does my icon look blocky at DVD resolution?

Because a DVD frame is 720x480 or 720x576 and an icon is at most 256x256. Scaling a 32 px icon to a full DVD frame enlarges it more than twentyfold, and no upscaler can invent detail that was never captured. Either leave Video resolution on "Keep original" and accept a small frame, or start from the 256 px entry of the icon for the least damage.

What happens to my icon's transparent background?

It gets filled with the Background Color, which is White by default, with Black and a range of other named colours available. No video format can store an alpha channel, so transparency has to be composited onto something at encode time. The same colour fills the letterbox bars when a square icon is placed in a 4:3 or 16:9 frame.

Does changing the Quality Preset actually shrink the file?

Barely, on this page. MPEG-2 is bitrate-driven rather than quality-factor driven, and the encoder clamps the bitrate to a resolution-based minimum with a 2 Mbps floor, so the preset has little room to act. Reducing Duration or dropping to a smaller Video resolution are the effective levers.

What happens to my uploaded file?

It travels over an encrypted connection, is processed on our servers, and is deleted automatically after a few hours. There is no sign-up, no watermark, and files are never shared or made public. If a video was not what you wanted after all, ICO to GIF keeps the icon as an image while still producing a format that plays inline on a web page.