OGV to BMP Converter

OGV to BMP: Three Presets, Three Different Bitmaps

BMP is a Windows bitmap — a header, an optional palette, and pixel rows, with no modern compression to speak of. That simplicity is exactly why people still want one: an installer resource, a splash screen, a firmware asset, a scientific tool that refuses anything else. This page decodes a frame out of your Ogg Theora video and writes it as a BMP.

The thing to understand before you pick a setting is that the Quality Preset on a BMP target does not mean "how much JPEG damage" — BMP has no lossy quality parameter. It selects between three genuinely different bitmap encodings, and the file you get from High is not a smaller-or-larger version of the file you get from Medium; it is a different kind of image.

How to Convert OGV to BMP

1. Upload Your OGV File: Drag the .ogv onto the page or click "Add Files" to browse. Multiple clips can be queued and share the same settings.
2. Pick a Quality Preset: Image Compression offers exactly three entries on a BMP target — High, Medium and Low — and opens on High. What each one writes is set out in the table below; there is no "Specific file size" option here, because BMP size is fixed by the pixel geometry rather than by a quality dial.
3. Set Frame Selection and Image resolution: Frame Selection opens on Specific Frame with Time (seconds) at 0; type a timestamp, or switch to Multiple Screenshots and choose a Capture Rate. Image resolution opens on Keep original, with Resolution Percentage, Preset Resolutions, Width, Height and Width x Height as alternatives.
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .bmp. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically after a few hours — no sign-up, no watermark.

What Each Preset Actually Writes

Two consequences follow from that table, and both surprise people.

There is no 24-bit true-colour BMP here. The highest-fidelity path is RGB555 at two bytes per pixel, not the 8-bits-per-channel bitmap most people picture when they say "BMP". A 640 x 360 frame at High comes to 460,854 bytes — 640 x 360 x 2 for the pixels plus the 54-byte file and info header, exactly as the stride arithmetic predicts. If your destination genuinely requires 24-bit BGR pixel data, this is not the route to it.

Low is not reliably smaller than Medium. Run-length encoding compresses runs of identical palette indices, and Low's harsher 86-colour dither fragments those runs while Medium gets a smoothing pass that helps them survive. On graphic content Low usually wins; on noisy photographic frames the two land close together and the ordering can invert. Try both if the byte count matters.

Choosing a Frame, When You Cannot Preview the Video

The Time (seconds) box opens at 0, and frame zero is rarely the frame anyone wants — recordings routinely start on black, on a fade, or on a title card. The awkward part is finding the timestamp at all, because an .ogv will not play in a current browser. Chrome disabled Theora decoding by default in version 120 and Chromium removed it in 123; Firefox disabled it by default in version 126; Safari never shipped it. VLC and mpv still decode Theora happily, so the practical routine is to scrub there, note the time, and type it in.

If you cannot open the file anywhere, Multiple Screenshots is the way through. It samples the whole clip at a Capture Rate ranging from one frame every 0.1 second up to one every 10 seconds, opening at one per second, and returns a separate .bmp for each sample. Start coarse: at one frame per second a ten-minute recording produces six hundred bitmaps, and at High preset each of those is two bytes per pixel of uncompressed data.

BMP Compared With the Other Still Targets

For anything that is going onto a web page, into a document, or up to a chat app, BMP is the wrong answer — it is large and it compresses nothing. Its one real advantage is that the format is so old and so simple that almost any code can parse it without a library.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does the Quality Preset only offer High, Medium and Low?

Because those are the only three bitmap encodings this conversion implements, and the dropdown hides the rest on a BMP target rather than offering settings that would fail. The seven-step ladder you see on JPEG, WebP or HEIF targets maps to a lossy quality number, which BMP does not have. Here the preset is really a format selector: High writes uncompressed 16-bit pixels, Medium and Low write run-length-encoded 8-bit palettes with different colour counts.

Can I get a normal 24-bit BMP out of this?

Not from this page. The High preset writes 16-bit RGB555 — 32,768 colours at two bytes per pixel — and there is no true-colour path behind it. For most consumers of a bitmap this is fine, because the file is still a valid uncompressed BMP that any reader handles. If your destination specifically requires 24-bit BGR rows, convert to PNG here and re-save as 24-bit BMP in an image editor, where you can set the depth explicitly.

Why is my BMP so much bigger than the whole video?

Because the video is compressed and the bitmap is not. Theora spends a few hundred kilobytes on several seconds of moving picture by describing how each frame differs from the last; a High-preset BMP stores every pixel of one frame with no compression at all, which is two bytes per pixel plus a 54-byte header — about 450 KB for a 640 x 360 frame, and about 4 MB for a 1080p one. That is the format working as designed, not a settings mistake.

Why won't my .ogv play so I can find the right timestamp?

Because browsers have removed Theora. Chrome disabled it by default in version 120 and Chromium dropped the decoder in 123, Firefox disabled it by default in version 126, and Safari never supported it. Nothing is wrong with your file — VLC and mpv still play .ogv normally, and so does anything built on ffmpeg. Scrub there to find the moment you want, then enter that time in the Time (seconds) box, or use Multiple Screenshots to sample blind.

Does the BMP keep transparency from the video?

There is none to keep. Theora has no alpha channel, so every frame of an .ogv is fully opaque, and this conversion does not write an alpha channel into the bitmap either. If you need a cut-out you will have to make it yourself: extract the frame as OGV to PNG, which supports alpha, and remove the background in an editor.

What happened to the audio track?

It is discarded. A BMP is a single still picture with nowhere to store sound, so the Vorbis audio in the Ogg container is dropped during frame extraction. If you want the soundtrack as a separate file, run the same .ogv through OGV to MP3.

Will the bitmap come out at the video's own resolution?

Yes, by default. Image resolution opens on Keep original, so a 640 x 360 clip yields a 640 x 360 bitmap. Preset Resolutions set the height and let the width follow the source aspect ratio; Width x Height forces both. Because BMP size scales directly with pixel count, halving the resolution quarters the file — often the most effective size lever on this page, since the presets change encoding rather than quantisation.

Does the frame look soft because of the BMP settings?

Almost certainly not. BMP at High adds no compression damage at all, so what you are seeing came out of the Theora encode. Ogg Theora video from the 2008-2012 web era was often encoded at low bitrates, and a frame in fast motion carries the most artefacts because it was coded as a difference from its neighbours. Picking a calmer moment helps far more than changing the preset; nothing in a bitmap encoder can restore detail the video never stored.

What happens to my uploaded video afterwards?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, decoded on our servers, and both the upload and the bitmaps it produced are deleted automatically after a few hours. Files are never shared or made public, and there is no sign-up, no watermark and no account required.