Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT / .pbf)
Open BetaMVT (Mapbox Vector Tiles) is an open specification for binary vector tiles built on Protocol Buffers, now the de-facto standard of web cartography. Each tile holds geometries and attributes in a tile-local coordinate grid, while styling happens entirely on the client — so the same tileset renders under any style without regeneration. On osm2cdr.ru the export pulls the chosen OSM area, converts layers to tiles via GDAL (the MVT driver in ogr2ogr) and packages the result into a ZIP archive with a z/x/y.pbf hierarchy. If the MVT driver is unavailable in the environment, the archive honestly includes the source GeoJSON with conversion instructions instead.
Key Features
About MVT Format
MVT is an open vector tile specification built on Protocol Buffers: inside are geometries and attributes in the tile's own coordinate grid, and how to draw them is up to the client. That is exactly why one set of tiles can be shown in a light theme, a dark one or as a schematic without regenerating the data — only the style file changes.
The format is chosen when the map has to be interactive: labels and objects are clickable, layers switch on and off on the fly, thematic colouring is computed in the browser. Raster tiles cannot do that — there the map is already drawn and all that is left is to show it.
The export collects the selected area from OSM, converts the layers into tiles through the MVT driver in GDAL and packs the result into a ZIP with a z/x/y.pbf tree; by default zooms 0-14 are built, with a ceiling of 16. Layers inside a tile stay separate (roads, buildings, points of interest), names are in UTF-8, so Cyrillic does not break. If the MVT driver is unavailable in the environment, the archive honestly receives the source GeoJSON and a README with a command for converting it yourself — instead of an empty or broken archive.
What Program Opens MVT Files
The following programs and applications can open, edit, and work with Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT / .pbf) (.mvt.zip) files exported from OSM2CDR:
Format specifications
- Open standard
- 2D only
- Lossless (no quality loss)
- Stores feature attributes
- Output: 1 file
- A ZIP holding a z/x/y.pbf tree of Mapbox Vector Tiles (z0-14, capped z16) built via the GDAL MVT driver; if the driver is missing, the source GeoJSON is shipped honestly instead.
Who Uses MVT Maps
How to Export MVT
How to Open After Export
- Static hosting (Nginx, S3, GitHub Pages) — unpack the archive so that addresses of the form /tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf are served as files, and point the style at that template as its source.
- MapLibre GL JS or Mapbox GL JS — add a source of type vector with the field tiles: ["https://your-domain/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.pbf"] and write the style layers; without a style vector tiles will not be drawn.
- QGIS (free) — in the Browser panel create a Vector Tiles connection of type "Directory" and point it at the unpacked folder: the tiles open locally, with no server.
- go-pmtiles or mb-util — pack the tile tree into a single PMTiles or MBTiles file if serving thousands of small files is inconvenient.
- If the archive turned out to contain GeoJSON — that is by design, for when the driver is missing: build the tiles yourself with the command from the README (ogr2ogr -f MVT) or with tippecanoe.
Popular maps in MVT
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