Free online RTF to WEBM converter

Some playback and publishing systems accept WebM video but not RTF documents. Converting the document makes its pages play as a timed video; it does not turn the RTF into live-action footage.

What the RTF format is

RTF (Rich Text Format) stores formatted text and basic document layout. Word processors such as Microsoft Word and LibreOffice Writer can create or open RTF files, so they commonly appear as documents exchanged between different word-processing programs.

What the WEBM format is

WebM is a video container commonly used for web playback, typically carrying VP8 or VP9 video. It suits systems that accept video files rather than office documents. Converting document pages to WebM produces a sequence of page images with a chosen display time.

How to convert RTF to WEBM

Online on 101convert.com

1. Upload the RTF file on the converter page. Several files can be added for batch conversion; the page shows the per-file size limit.
2. Set Show each page for to choose how long each document page appears.
3. Start the conversion, then download the resulting WebM file.

Offline with desktop software

There is no ordinary video stream inside an RTF file, so an offline workflow must render its pages before encoding them. LibreOffice, Poppler, and FFmpeg are free tools available for Linux; versions are also available for Windows and macOS.

1. Use LibreOffice Writer to convert the RTF to PDF: libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf --outdir work document.rtf.
2. Render the PDF pages as PNG images with Poppler: pdftoppm -png -r 150 work/document.pdf work/page. This creates image files such as page-1.png.
3. Create a text file named pages.txt listing the image files in numerical page order. For each page, add a line such as file 'page-1.png', followed by duration 4 to show it for four seconds. Repeat for every page, then add the final image once more as the last line so its duration is retained.
4. In the directory containing the images and manifest, encode the video with FFmpeg: ffmpeg -f concat -safe 0 -i pages.txt -vf "fps=30,scale=trunc(iw/2)*2:trunc(ih/2)*2,format=yuv420p" -c:v libvpx-vp9 -crf 32 -b:v 0 output.webm. Change the duration values in the manifest to adjust page timing.

Quality and limitations

The PDF-to-image step turns each page into pixels: the resulting video has no selectable text, document links, or audio. Higher rendering resolution improves readability but increases video dimensions and file size; page display time controls how long viewers have to read each page.