Convert M4V to OGV
Turn your M4V into an OGV. OGV is an older free video format from the early days of web video. Your file never leaves your computer.
Need the other direction? Convert OGV to M4V
How to convert M4V to OGV
- 1 Drop your M4V .m4v file onto the page, or click to browse for it.
- 2 Set the quality, or leave the default, which keeps the file small without anything showing.
- 3 Convert. The work happens on your own machine, so how long it takes depends on your computer and the file.
- 4 Download the OGV, or add more files and do the whole set in one go.
Why convert M4V to OGV
- Completely patent free and open.
- Supported natively by Firefox and Chrome.
- Legacy HTML5 video fallbacks.
- M4V: non-Apple players may refuse the extension even when the file is fine.
M4V compared with OGV
How the two formats differ on the things that decide whether a conversion is worth making.
| Property | M4V | OGV |
|---|---|---|
| File extension | .m4v | .ogv |
| Introduced | 2005 | 2004 |
| Developed by | Apple | Xiph.Org Foundation |
| Standard | Proprietary | Open |
Quality and what changes
Both formats are lossy, so this is a second generation of compression: the M4V is decoded back to pixels that already carry its artefacts, and OGV then compresses that. The damage compounds rather than cancelling out, which is why repeated round trips visibly degrade an image. Encode at a higher quality than the source used, and convert once from the best copy you have rather than from an already converted file.
- Files protected with DRM cannot be decoded and will fail rather than convert.
- One OGV limitation to keep in mind: safari will not play it, and most devices struggle with it.
Questions about M4V to OGV
Will converting M4V to OGV lose quality?
A little. Both formats are lossy, so the file is decoded and compressed a second time and the two sets of artefacts add up. At a high quality setting the difference is hard to see, but avoid repeated round trips between lossy formats.
Is my M4V file uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole thing runs inside the browser tab you already have open. Your M4V is read straight from your own disk, converted on your machine and handed back as an OGV. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is stored and there is no account.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no server-side limit because no server sees the file. The real ceiling is your device memory, since the input and the output both have to fit in the tab. A few hundred megabytes is usually fine on a desktop machine and considerably less on a phone.
Can I convert several M4V files at once?
Yes. Add as many as you like and they are processed one after another, then offered as separate OGV downloads or as a single ZIP. Speed depends on your own processor rather than on a queue.
Does the converter work offline?
Yes, after the page has loaded once. The engine is cached by the browser, so you can disconnect, reload and keep converting. That falls out of doing the work locally rather than being a separate mode you switch on.