Free online RTF to MKV converter

A presentation player or digital-signage system may require an MKV video even when the source content is an RTF document. Converting it makes each document page a timed video frame; it does not turn the document into editable video text.

What the RTF format is

RTF (Rich Text Format) stores formatted text and basic page layout, and is commonly created by word processors such as Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer. It is used for exchanging documents and can appear as an exported file or an older office document.

What the MKV format is

MKV (Matroska Video) is a container for video, audio, subtitles, and related tracks. It can hold video encoded with codecs such as H.264, but device support for MKV and its contained codecs varies. For this conversion, the pages become still images shown in sequence for a set duration.

How to convert an RTF file to MKV

Online on 101convert.com

1. Upload the RTF file on the converter page. You can add several files for batch conversion; the page shows the per-file size limit.
2. Set show each page for to choose how long each page appears.
3. Start the conversion, then download the resulting MKV file.

Offline with desktop software

A free workflow uses LibreOffice to render the document and FFmpeg to assemble the pages into a video. LibreOffice and FFmpeg are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux; pdftoppm, included with Poppler, renders PDF pages to image files.

1. Open the RTF in LibreOffice and export it as a PDF using File → Export As → Export as PDF.
2. In a terminal opened in a working folder containing the PDF, render its pages: pdftoppm -png -r 150 document.pdf page. This creates files such as page-1.png.
3. Run FFmpeg in the folder containing the page images. This example shows each page for five seconds and creates a 1280 × 720 H.264 video in an MKV container:

ffmpeg -framerate 1/5 -start_number 1 -i page-%d.png -vf "scale=1280:720:force_original_aspect_ratio=decrease,pad=1280:720:(ow-iw)/2:(oh-ih)/2,format=yuv420p" -r 25 -c:v libx264 -crf 18 -tune stillimage -an output.mkv

Quality and limitations

Page layout depends on the fonts and page settings available when LibreOffice exports the RTF to PDF. The resulting video contains page images, not selectable or searchable document text; increasing the render resolution with -r can improve the legibility of small print. MKV is a container rather than a video codec, so check that the target device supports both MKV and H.264.