Drop any file to identify it
No upload. No signup. No sending your file halfway across the internet.
We tell you what it is, right here in your browser.
Drop it!
Let go to identify this file.
Couldn't identify this file
Need to convert it? fwip it →
OGV was the open-source community's answer to patent-encumbered video formats. Built on the Ogg container with Theora video compression, it was Firefox's native HTML5 video format before WebM arrived and effectively replaced it. Wikipedia used OGV for years as its video format of choice because it was completely royalty-free.
The technical reality: Theora compression is significantly less efficient than H.264 or VP9. An OGV file will be noticeably larger than an equivalent MP4 at the same quality. The format was politically important — it proved that open-source codecs could work — but it lost the quality-per-byte competition decisively.
You'll still encounter OGV in Wikimedia projects, open-source software documentation, and Linux-centric workflows. VLC and Firefox play them natively. For anything else, convert to WebM (which inherited OGV's open-source spirit with VP9's better compression) or MP4.