Free online ICO to MOV converter

A video editor or playback system may require a MOV clip rather than an ICO icon. Converting the icon makes a still-image video, with the picture held on screen for a chosen duration.

What the ICO format is

ICO is an image-container format for icons, commonly used for Windows applications, folders, and shortcuts. Icon editors and Windows resource tools can create or export ICO files; they often contain several versions of the same image at different sizes.

What the MOV format is

MOV is a multimedia container developed for QuickTime. It can hold video and audio tracks encoded with different codecs, and is supported by many video editors and Apple applications. Converting an ICO produces a video of a still image, not an animated icon.

How to convert ICO to MOV

Online on 101convert.com

1. Upload one or more ICO files; the converter supports batch conversion. Check the per-file size limit shown on the page.
2. Set show each picture for to choose how long each image appears.
3. Convert the files, then download the MOV output.

Offline with desktop software

ImageMagick and FFmpeg are free, open-source command-line programs available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. ImageMagick extracts an image from the ICO; FFmpeg encodes it as a five-second MOV. If the ICO contains multiple sizes, [0] selects its first image entry.

1. Extract the first ICO image as PNG: magick "input.ico[0]" frame.png.
2. Create the MOV: ffmpeg -loop 1 -i frame.png -t 5 -r 30 -vf "scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2,format=yuv420p" -c:v libx264 output.mov.

Quality and compatibility

The FFmpeg command creates a 30-frame-per-second H.264 video with no audio; -t 5 sets its duration to five seconds. The even-dimension scaling supports H.264 encoding, while yuv420p improves playback compatibility. This pixel format does not preserve ICO transparency, so transparent areas may appear black.