OGV to ICO Converter

Turning an OGV Frame into an .ico: What This Covers

This is a frame grabber with an icon encoder on the end. One moment is decoded out of your Ogg video, and that single still is written as a Windows .ico — the format used for favicons, shortcut icons, and application icons. There is no animation in the result and there is no timeline scrubber to drag: you type the timestamp you want. This tutorial covers choosing that moment, the size presets, and one hard limit in the ICO format that decides which presets are usable at all.

How to Convert OGV to ICO

1. Upload Your OGV File: Drag and drop the .ogv onto the page or click "Add Files" to browse. More than one clip can be queued.
2. Set Frame Selection and Time (seconds): Frame Selection opens on "Specific Frame" with its Time (seconds) box at 0. Type the moment you want — 2.1 grabs the frame at two seconds and 100 milliseconds. Switching to "Multiple Screenshots" instead samples the whole clip at a Capture Rate you choose.
3. Pick a Preset under Image resolution: The preset list is the only sizing control on this page — 256P, 192P, 180P, 128P, 64P, 48P, 32P, 24P, and 16P. Each preset sets the output height; the width follows the source aspect ratio, which matters more than it sounds (see below).
4. Convert and Download: Click Convert and save the .ico. Files are uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and deleted automatically a few hours later — no sign-up, no watermark.

Walk-through: Picking the Frame

The Time (seconds) box starts at 0, and on real footage that is rarely the frame you want. The opening frame of a recording is routinely black, mid-fade, or caught while the camera is still hunting for focus — screen recordings often begin on an empty desktop, and edited clips often begin on a title card. Treat 0 as a placeholder rather than a default worth keeping.

• You know the moment: stay on "Specific Frame" and type it. The field takes decimals, so 12.5 is twelve and a half seconds in. The extraction seeks to that point in the Theora timeline, decodes one frame, and hands that picture to the icon encoder.
• You do not know the moment: switch to "Multiple Screenshots" and set the Capture Rate. The choices run from one frame every 0.1 second up to one frame every 10 seconds, and it opens at one frame per second. Each sampled frame comes back as its own .ico, so you can pick the good one and discard the rest. On a long recording this produces a lot of files — one per second of video at the default rate — so start coarse.
• You cannot preview the OGV to find the timestamp: that is expected on a current desktop browser, since Chrome disabled Theora by default in version 120 and removed the decoder in 123 (March 2024), and Firefox disabled it by default in version 126 (May 2024). Scrub the clip in VLC or mpv, note the time, and type it here. Our server-side decoder still handles Theora perfectly.

There is no quality slider, no colour-depth selector, and no palette control on this page — the preset list is the entire option surface besides frame selection. If you were looking for a 32-bit versus 8-bit choice, that decision is made by the encoder, not by you.

Preset Sizes and the 256-Pixel Wall

An ICO directory entry stores each image's width and height in a single byte each — Microsoft's own ICONDIRENTRY definition declares them as BYTE bWidth and BYTE bHeight. That caps a declared dimension at 256 pixels. Because the presets here set height and let width follow the source aspect, a widescreen video frame blows past that ceiling on the width axis long before the height gets anywhere near it, and the declared width wraps around.

We measured this directly with the same resize-and-write step the converter uses, on a 16:9 frame:

The practical rule: for a 16:9 video frame, 128P is the largest preset that produces a well-formed icon. A 4:3 frame has more headroom — at 192P it lands on exactly 256 x 192 and is fine — but 256P mismatches there too, because a 4:3 frame at 256 lines is 341 pixels wide. If you want a large, square, standards-clean icon, take the two-step route in the last section instead.

OGV vs ICO at a Glance

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

• "The icon is black or empty" — you converted at the default Time (seconds) of 0 and the clip opens on black or a fade. Enter a timestamp a few seconds in and run it again.
• "The icon looks squashed or garbled at large sizes" — you used 180P, 192P, or 256P with a widescreen frame and hit the one-byte width limit described above. Drop to 128P or smaller.
• "It looks like a letterboxed strip, not an icon" — the output keeps the video's aspect ratio, and icon slots are square. A 228 x 128 icon will be padded or stretched by whatever displays it. Crop the frame square first via the route below.
• "It is unreadable at 16 or 32 pixels" — a full video frame downscaled to icon size loses everything fine. Pick a moment with one bold, high-contrast, centred subject; text and faces disappear below about 48 pixels.
• "I got dozens of .ico files" — Frame Selection was on "Multiple Screenshots", which produces one icon per sampled frame across the whole clip. Switch back to "Specific Frame", or raise the Capture Rate so it samples less often.
• "The still is soft or blocky before I even shrink it" — Theora is lossy, so the source frame already carries compression artefacts. Nothing downstream can add detail that was never recorded.

When to Use a Different Route

For a genuine favicon you almost always want a square image at a size the format handles cleanly, and that means cropping before you encode. Extract the frame at full resolution with OGV to PNG, crop it to a square with Crop PNG, then encode the icon with PNG to ICO. That path gives you a square 256 x 256 icon with no wrapped dimensions and lets you choose the exact framing rather than accepting the whole video frame. It is also the only sensible way to build a multi-size favicon.ico bundling 16, 32, and 48 pixel layers, since this converter writes one size per run.

Frequently Asked Questions

What size should I export for a website favicon?

32 x 32 pixels is the common default and 16 x 16 is the legacy browser-tab size, with 48 x 48 useful for Windows shortcuts. If you export only one size, 32 is the safest single choice. Bear in mind the presets here set height, not a square — at 32P a 16:9 frame becomes 57 x 32, which is a valid icon file but not a square one. For a proper square favicon, crop the frame first using the PNG route described above.

Why does 256P produce a broken icon?

Because the icon directory can only describe 256 pixels per axis, and the preset controls height while width follows the source aspect. A 16:9 frame at 256 lines is 455 pixels wide, which does not fit in the one-byte width field. In our measurements the file ends up declaring 256 x 256 while carrying a 455 x 256 image, and viewers disagree about what to do with that. Stay at 128P or below for widescreen frames; use the crop-first route if you need a real 256 x 256 icon.

Does the icon keep transparency from the video?

There is nothing to keep. Video frames are fully opaque — Theora has no alpha channel — so the extracted still is a solid rectangle and the icon inherits that solid background. The ICO format itself supports transparency, both as a one-bit mask and as a full alpha channel at 32-bit colour, so if you need a transparent icon, remove the background in an image editor after exporting the frame as a PNG and encode the icon from that instead.

How do I capture a specific moment rather than the first frame?

Leave Frame Selection on "Specific Frame" and type the timestamp into the Time (seconds) box. It accepts decimals, so 5 is five seconds in and 5.25 is five and a quarter. The default of 0 grabs the very first frame, which on real footage is frequently black, mid-fade, or out of focus — nudging a couple of seconds in almost always gives a better picture.

Can one ICO file hold several sizes at once?

The format is designed for exactly that — an icon file can carry multiple images so the operating system picks the right one for each context — but this converter writes one size per run. To bundle 16, 32, and 48 pixel layers into a single favicon.ico, export the frame as a still with OGV to PNG and build the multi-size icon from it with PNG to ICO.

Why can't I set the colour depth or a quality level?

Because neither control renders on this page. The complete option surface for OGV to ICO is Frame Selection plus the Image resolution preset list — there is no quality preset, no bit-depth selector, no colour-palette size, and no target-file-size field. Icon files are small enough that the choice rarely matters; if you need precise control over palette and depth, encode the icon from a PNG with PNG to ICO instead.

What happened to the audio in my video?

It is discarded, because an icon is a single still picture with nowhere to put a soundtrack. If you want the audio from the same .ogv, run it separately through OGV to MP3, which extracts the Vorbis track and re-encodes it.

Will this work if my browser cannot play the OGV?

Yes. Chrome disabled Theora by default in version 120 and removed the decoder in 123 (March 2024), and Firefox disabled it by default in version 126 (May 2024), so an .ogv may not preview on a current desktop even though the file itself is perfectly intact. Decoding happens on our servers with a toolchain that still supports Theora, so the conversion works regardless. You will just need another way to find your timestamp — VLC and mpv both still play .ogv files.

What happens to my uploaded video afterwards?

It is uploaded over an encrypted connection, processed on our servers, and both the upload and the resulting icon are deleted automatically a few hours after conversion. Nothing is shared or made public, and there is no sign-up, no watermark, and no email required.