ODG to VOB Converter

ODG to VOB: A Drawing in DVD-Video Packaging

.odg is an OpenDocument Graphics drawing from LibreOffice Draw or Apache OpenOffice Draw — vector shapes and text frames stored as XML inside a ZIP. .vob is the Video Object file DVD-Video uses: a strict subset of the MPEG-2 program stream, defined in the DVD-Video Book the DVD Forum finalised for the format's late-1996 launch, and the thing you find inside a disc's VIDEO_TS folder as VTS_01_1.VOB and friends. This page renders your drawing and encodes each page as a silent held frame in a VOB-named MPEG-2 program stream — worth doing when a DVD authoring tool or an older player wants that shape of file, and pointless otherwise.

How to Convert ODG to VOB

1. Upload Your ODG File: Drag the .odg onto the page or click "+ Add Files". With several files, Merge strategy picks the outcome: "Merge images" writes one stream holding each drawing in turn, "Video per image" writes one .vob per upload.
2. Choose the Video Codec: Video Codec offers MPEG-2 (preselected) and MPEG-1. MPEG-2 is the only one a DVD-oriented tool expects — MPEG-1 is there for VCD-era equipment.
3. Set the Video Resolution and Image Duration: This matters more here than on most pages. Video resolution opens on "Keep original", which for an A4 drawing is a 300 DPI render near 2480 x 3508 — far outside anything DVD-shaped. Pick 720 x 480 (NTSC) or 720 x 576 (PAL) instead. Image Duration → Duration sets how long each page is held, 5 seconds by default.
4. Convert and Download: Click "Convert" and save the .vob. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours. No sign-up, no watermark.

VOB as Specified vs the File This Page Writes

Read that before feeding the file to a set-top player: this is source material for a DVD authoring application, not a finished disc asset.

How the Drawing Becomes a Frame

LibreOffice opens the .odg as a Draw document, exports it with Draw's own PDF filter, and each PDF page is rendered at 300 DPI into a frame the encoder then compresses. Page count survives, so a three-page drawing becomes three held frames in one stream.

The one thing to watch is size: MPEG-2 enforces a minimum bitrate that scales with the frame's pixel count, so a full-resolution render produces a much larger file than the content warrants. Choosing a DVD raster is both more authentic and dramatically smaller. Fonts are resolved on our servers during the render, so convert text to curves in Draw (Shape ▸ Convert ▸ To Curve) first if the drawing depends on a typeface only you have installed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I burn this straight to a DVD?

No. A playable DVD needs a whole VIDEO_TS structure — IFO and BUP navigation files, correctly named VOB segments, compliant resolution, frame rate and audio. What you get here is one loose program stream. Feed it into a DVD authoring application as source material and let that tool build the disc; the authoring step is where compliance is actually enforced.

Why is there no audio track?

Because an ODG is a still drawing with nothing to encode, so the Audio Codec group does not render and the muxer writes a video-only stream. DVD-Video expects at least one audio track, which is another reason this file is source material rather than a finished asset. Add a silent AC-3 or LPCM track in your authoring tool if its validator insists.

What resolution should I pick?

720 x 480 for NTSC regions or 720 x 576 for PAL, both under Fixed Resolutions, unless the authoring tool tells you otherwise. Leaving Video resolution on "Keep original" hands the encoder a print-grade 300 DPI render — perfectly sharp, but wildly outside DVD's constraints and expensive to encode because MPEG-2's minimum bitrate scales with pixel count.

Why does the quality slider do so little?

Because MPEG-2 has no quality-based rate control in this pipeline. A Constant Quality or Constraint Quality request is converted into a bitrate target derived from the frame size, and the encoder refuses to go below the minimum that resolution needs. Frame size is the lever that genuinely changes an MPEG-2 output; the quality controls only bite on MPEG-1, which takes a 1–31 scale where lower is better.

My drawing has several pages — what happens?

Each page becomes its own held frame inside the same stream, in page order, shown for the Image Duration. That is usually what you want for a title or menu-background sequence. If you would rather have one file per page, save the pages as separate .odg files in LibreOffice Draw, upload them together and set Merge strategy to "Video per image".

Will the colours look the same as in Draw?

Close, with two caveats. Anything unpainted is flattened onto the Background Color, which opens on White. And MPEG-2 stores colour as 4:2:0, keeping full brightness detail but halving colour resolution in both directions — thin saturated lines, especially red on white, can look slightly soft or fringed. Thickening hairlines in Draw before converting helps more than any encoder setting.

Is VOB really the right target for a diagram?

Only if a DVD workflow is genuinely involved. For a diagram that just needs to play somewhere, ODG to MP4 is smaller, sharper and plays on everything; for a picture, ODG to PNG is the direct route. VOB earns its place when you are authoring a disc, building a menu background, or feeding equipment that predates the MP4 era.

How are my uploaded files handled?

Your drawing is uploaded over an encrypted connection, rendered and encoded on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours later along with the .vob it produced. Nothing is shared, published or reused, no account is required, and no watermark is applied. The ODG converter hub lists every other target for the same source file.