Remove Audio from Video
Take the sound out. Nothing is uploaded, whatever the size.
No size limit: the picture data is copied, never re-encoded.
Writes the file again without the audio data, so it gets smaller. The picture is copied, not re-encoded. Takes about as long as reading the file once.
- 100% freeNo account, no daily quota, no paid tier.
- Nothing is uploadedFiles are processed on your device and never reach a server.
- No catch on the outputNo watermark, no forced downscaling, no size cap.
- Updated in the openEvery fix and every new tool is written down on the changelog page.
What this tool does
Drop a video in and this page gives you the same video with no sound. The picture is never touched: both routes copy the video stream across frame for frame, so the clip you download has the same resolution, bitrate and quality as the one you started with. Before anything happens you are shown what is actually in the file — the codec of the sound track, its channels and sample rate, the length of the clip — so you can tell a silent recording apart from one whose sound simply is not playing.
Nothing is uploaded, and on this kind of file that matters more than usual. A screen recording or a dashcam export runs from a few hundred megabytes into several gigabytes, and the services that ask you to upload cap you well below that: 200 MB at one of the best known ones, 500 MB at another, with the file sitting on their disk for an hour afterwards. The audio you want deleted is often the reason you are here, which makes pushing the file to a stranger's server an odd first step.
How to use it
Drag the file onto the page or click to pick one. You get a thumbnail, the file name and a line describing the sound track, then one choice: smaller file, or instant. Press the button, play the result to confirm the sound is gone, and save it. The saved file keeps the original name with -muted added.
Smaller file rewrites the container without the audio data, so the file really does shrink by the size of the sound: an AAC track at 128 kbps is about 0.96 MB per minute, so an hour of video loses roughly 58 MB. The video packets are copied, not encoded again. It reads through the whole file and assembles the result in memory, which is the one real limit here.
Instant works differently. In an MP4 or MOV the sound track is described by a small box near the front or back of the file, and this route changes four bytes of it: the label trak becomes free, which the format defines as a block every reader must skip. No player can find the track after that, and nothing else is read, so it finishes in milliseconds whether the file is 20 MB or 2 GB. The trade is on the label: the file does not get smaller, because the audio bytes are still inside it. Above 600 MB it is picked for you, since assembling a file that large in memory is what makes a tab give up.
Things worth knowing before you save
The most common surprise is a file exactly the same size as before. That is the instant route doing what it says: the track is detached, not deleted, so players treat the video as silent while the sound data stays in the file as ignored padding. If you wanted a smaller file, or the audio contains something that should be gone rather than hidden, use the other route. Also check what you are losing: a film or a recorded meeting can carry several sound tracks, and this tool removes all of them. WebM and MKV have no equivalent of the four byte trick, so those always take the rewriting route.
Background: why the sound is a separate track
A video file does not store a video. It stores tracks, each an independent timed stream with its own codec, and an index at the front saying where the pieces of each track live in the block of data that follows. That design came from Apple's QuickTime in 1991, was handed to the standards bodies as the basis of MPEG-4, and became the ISO base media file format, ISO/IEC 14496-12, in 2004; MP4 itself is ISO/IEC 14496-14, published in 2003. Because sound and picture are separate tracks rather than one interleaved signal, removing one does not require touching the other. The same specification defines the free box as space a reader must skip, which is what makes relabelling a track into one a legal edit rather than a hack.
Where people use it
The everyday case is a clip bound for a social platform that will lay its own music over it, where the room noise only gets in the way. Screen recordings are the second: a walkthrough recorded with the microphone on picks up whatever was said nearby. Dashcam footage is the same problem with higher stakes: those files record conversations inside the car that do not belong in a clip you hand to an insurer. Video that must autoplay on a web page is a technical case: browsers only start it unprompted if it carries no sound. To keep the audio, video to MP3 pulls the track out as its own file; if the picture lies on its side, rotate video fixes it without re-encoding. For a still, Video to Image saves any frame; for a section, Trim Video cuts it.
Frequently asked questions
Does removing the audio reduce the quality of the video?
No. The video stream is copied packet for packet on both routes, so the saved picture is identical to the original.
Why is my file the same size after muting it?
You used the instant route, which detaches the sound track in four bytes and leaves the audio data in the file as ignored padding. Choose the smaller file option to write a new file without those bytes.
Is there a file size limit?
No limit is set here. The instant route never reads the picture data, so a 2 GB recording is handled as fast as a small one. The smaller-file route assembles the file in memory, so for very large files the instant one is safer.
Can I remove just one of several audio tracks?
Not on this page: every sound track is removed. To keep one of them, extract it first with video to MP3, which lets you pick a track.
Does the video get uploaded anywhere?
No. Your browser opens the file and never sends it over the network; the tool keeps working with the internet disconnected.