ODG to HEVC Converter

ODG to HEVC Converter

An .odg is an OpenDocument Graphics drawing — the native format of LibreOffice Draw and Apache OpenOffice Draw, holding shapes, flowcharts and text boxes as editable XML inside a ZIP. HEVC (H.265) is a modern video compression standard, and the .hevc file this tool writes is an H.265 stream inside a Matroska container; only the extension is unusual. This converter renders your Draw document through the office pipeline and encodes the rendered pages as held frames in a silent clip. Both formats are laid out in full below, because for most people a static drawing gains very little from being wrapped in a video codec — and the tables make it clear what to convert to instead.

ODG Format at a Glance

HEVC (H.265) Format at a Glance

How to Convert ODG to HEVC

1. Upload Your ODG File: Drag the .odg onto the page or click "+ Add Files". The entire Draw document is read, so multi-page files need no preparation.
2. Pick a Video Codec: "Video Codec" offers H.265 (preselected) and HEVC, which are two names for the same coding standard. Either produces the same kind of stream.
3. Set File Compression and Video resolution: "File Compression" opens on "Quality Preset" at "Very High (Recommended)", with Constant Quality and Constraint Quality if you would rather drive a quantizer and cap the bitrate. "Video resolution" starts on "Keep original" and takes a preset height, a percentage or an exact Width x Height — this is the pixel grid the drawing is rendered onto.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save the .hevc. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

What the Pipeline Does

A .odg is a page-layout document, not a picture, so it goes through the office route: LibreOffice Draw's own PDF export filter reads the drawing and writes a PDF that keeps the document's page size and object positions, each PDF page is rendered to a full-colour raster at 300 DPI, and ffmpeg encodes those renders as held frames in the H.265 stream. Because the render follows the page's physical dimensions rather than any stored pixel count, a US Letter page arrives near 2550 × 3300 px and A4 near 2481 × 3507 px, which is why "Video resolution" is the control worth setting deliberately.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is a .hevc file, and how is it different from an MP4?

It is an H.265 video stream inside a Matroska container — a real, seekable video; only the extension is unusual. An MP4 or MOV holds the same kind of H.265 (or H.264) track in a container that stock apps recognise. The practical difference is support: MKV-capable players such as VLC and mpv open the .hevc directly, and renaming it to .mkv helps software that goes by extension, but many stock players and browsers expect MP4 and will not open it by double-clicking even on a machine that plays HEVC happily inside MP4. If you want a file that behaves like a normal video everywhere, ODG to MP4 is the route.

Will my HEVC file play in a web browser or on any device?

Not reliably. HEVC is patent-encumbered, so support is conditional rather than universal: Safari on macOS and iOS decodes it natively, Chrome on Windows needs a GPU with a hardware HEVC decoder, and Microsoft Edge needs the separately installed HEVC Video Extension. On top of that the output is a Matroska file, and browsers generally do not play Matroska in a <video> tag — so even where the codec is available, the file usually will not play on a web page. For a clip that plays on virtually every phone, browser and TV, ODG to MP4 wraps the same rendered pages in H.264 inside an MP4.

Why does converting ODG to HEVC rasterise my drawing instead of keeping the vectors?

An ODG is vector — shapes and paths that resize without loss — but a video frame is a grid of pixels. To encode the drawing as H.265 it has to be sampled onto a fixed canvas, and from that point it is no longer scalable; enlarging the stream later only softens it. If keeping the drawing crisp at any zoom matters more than having a video, ODG to PDF or ODG to SVG preserves the vector geometry instead.

Why is my converted HEVC file silent?

Because an ODG is a drawing with no audio — there is nothing to encode. The Matroska container the output uses could carry an AAC track perfectly well; the source simply has nothing to fill it with. To add music or narration, convert to ODG to MP4 and then add an audio track in a video editor such as Shotcut or DaVinci Resolve.

Does HEVC's efficiency make my drawing smaller or higher quality?

No. HEVC's advantage is compressing moving video into far fewer bytes than older codecs, and that buys you nothing for held still frames — a static page already compresses to almost nothing in any modern codec. Encoding cannot add detail either; the encode is lossy and never invents pixels, so quality is fixed the moment you choose the resolution. For full fidelity, keep the drawing as a lossless raster with ODG to PNG, or as vectors with ODG to SVG.

My ODG has several pages — which one ends up in the HEVC file?

All of them, as successive held frames in one clip, in page order. The office stage exports the whole document to PDF and every page is rendered, so nothing is skipped and there is no need to split the file first. If you want the pages as separate images, an image target returns one file per page.

What happens to transparency in the drawing?

It does not survive. Video streams have no alpha channel, so transparent regions are flattened onto an opaque background before encoding, and the same fill covers any bars left when the page's proportions do not match the frame. Use a PNG target when the transparency itself is the requirement.

Is HEVC even the right target for a drawing, or should I pick something else?

For almost everyone, something else. A static drawing gains nothing from a high-efficiency video codec, and a Matroska file with a .hevc extension is one of the least portable ways to hand it over — stock apps do not recognise it. If you simply need a usable copy, ODG to PDF keeps the vectors crisp and prints anywhere, and ODG to PNG gives a lossless image of each page. If you genuinely need the pages as a video, ODG to MP4 wraps them in a universally playable container. Choose .hevc here only when a specific pipeline explicitly expects an H.265 file under that name.

How are my files handled, and how long are they kept?

Your file is uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered and encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours after the conversion — no sign-up, no watermark, never shared or made public. The ODG converter hub lists every other target for this source.