Remove the audio from a video online

How to strip the audio in your browser

1. 01

   Open the file

   Drag an MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM or AVI onto the drop zone above, or click it and pick the file. It is read straight off your disk into the tab.

2. 02

   Check that Mute audio is on

   On this page the Mute audio toggle below the timeline starts switched on and reads "Audio muted". Click it if you change your mind; it is a plain on/off switch.

3. 03

   Add other edits if you want them

   A cut, a speed change or a Max resolution cap can go in the same pass. Leave the timeline empty if all you want is a silent copy.

4. 04

   Press the button

   With nothing on the timeline the apply button reads "Convert video"; with edits it reads "Apply All Edits". Either way, one press does everything. The first run downloads the ~32 MB engine, which is cached afterwards.

5. 05

   Download

   The finished file appears as a download link with its size next to it. Because the audio stream is gone entirely, it is a little smaller than the original.

What "mute" does to the file

It drops the audio stream. FFmpeg is run with -an, which tells the muxer to write no audio at all, so the result is not a video with a silent track — it is a video-only file. Players show no volume control, platforms treat it as silent, and the bytes the audio used to take are gone.

Whether the video is touched depends on what else you asked for. If muting is the only change and the output is MP4, MKV or MOV, the video stream is copied unchanged with -c:v copy -an — the same thing the command-line version below does, finished in a few seconds, with no loss of picture quality at all. If the source codec cannot go in the container you picked — VP8 from a WebM into an MP4, say — that copy fails and the editor falls back to the re-encode below automatically.

The moment you add a cut or a speed change, set a resolution cap, or choose WebM as the output, that shortcut is no longer possible: the frames go through a filter graph and a stream being filtered cannot be copied. The video is then re-encoded with libx264 at the ultrafast preset and CRF 28, or VP8 for WebM, and the audio is dropped from that encode. That costs one generation of lossy compression, which on ordinary footage is not visible but is not nothing. The trade is written up here.

The command-line version

If you have FFmpeg installed, a lossless audio strip is one line, and it is the honest benchmark this page should be measured against:

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c:v copy -an out.mp4

-c:v copy keeps the video bytes exactly as they are and -an leaves the audio out. The mute-only path here does the same thing; what the browser adds is not needing to install anything, and being able to cut or resize in the same pass when you do want that. The FFmpeg guide has more stream-copy recipes.

Why people remove the audio

Muting together with other edits

Mute is a switch, not a timeline range, so it combines with everything else the editor does. The common pairings:

• Cut a section out and mute — trim the dead air and lose the soundtrack in one encode.
• Speed up a section at 8x or more and mute — heavily accelerated audio is rarely worth keeping, and a timelapse is usually meant to be silent.
• Cap the resolution and mute — the two together are the quickest way to make a screen recording small enough to attach to an email or a ticket.
• Convert the container and mute — a MOV in, a silent MP4 out. With nothing else changed the editor tries a stream copy into the new container first, and re-encodes only if the source codec cannot go in it (a WebM into MP4, say).

Whatever you combine, the video is encoded at most once. If the source has no audio track to begin with, nothing changes: the mute setting is simply redundant and the encode proceeds normally.

What this does not do

It cannot lower the volume, silence a single stretch, fade the audio out, swap the soundtrack for another one, or save the audio as a separate file. It is a whole-track delete, and that is deliberate: it is the operation people most often need and the one that can be done without touching the picture. The formats page lists what else the editor can and cannot write, and the FAQ covers the rest.

Questions about removing audio