Mute Video

Sometimes a video is better without its sound. A looping clip for a website background should not autoplay noise. A screen recording of a bug may have caught a colleague’s conversation. A product demo will get a voice-over later. Removing the audio from a video should be a one-click job, and this page does it in the browser: it reads the video, writes the same pictures into a new file without any sound track, and gives you the result to download.

How the new file is made

The video is decoded by your browser and each frame is drawn and encoded again, as in the other video tools of this site. For this tool the audio option is set to remove, so the sound is never decoded, and only the video stream is written into the MP4 or WebM container. Because the audio stream is simply absent, the file does not contain a track of silence; players treat it as a video without sound.

A worked example

Press Sample, which records a three-second 320 × 180 clip with a beep each second, then press Remove the sound. The result is an MP4 of 320 × 180 pixels and about 2.9 seconds. The browser test opens the downloaded file and confirms that it has the MP4 signature and no audio handler, the box that would label a sound track. Turn on the format WebM and the same clip is written as a WebM with VP9 video and no audio.

Keeping the picture close to the source

Because the picture is encoded again, a small loss of quality is unavoidable. To keep it small, leave the size at Original and choose High quality, which spends 0.15 bits per pixel per frame. Choose Small file to cut the size instead; muting alone usually saves only the audio’s share, about 128 kbps, so the bigger savings come from a lower quality or a smaller picture. The frame rate follows the source, up to 60 frames per second.

When to use something else

If you need to keep the sound and only want a different container, the WebM to MP4 converter is more direct. If you want to keep the sound as a separate audio file before removing it, extract it first with the audio extraction tool. To mute only part of a video, cut it into pieces, mute one, and join them in an editor; this tool removes the whole track.

Edge cases

A video that already has no sound track is simply re-encoded. Files with several audio tracks lose all of them. Some phone videos include metadata such as location and capture time; the new file does not copy it, but that is a side effect of re-encoding, not a privacy guarantee. Very long videos take longer to process, and the browser tab must stay open.

Limits

The picture is re-encoded, not copied. There is no option to keep part of the sound or to replace it with music. MP4 output requires a browser that can encode H.264; if it cannot, choose WebM. Everything happens on your device and nothing is uploaded.

Related tools

• Extract Audio from Video saves the sound separately first.
• Video Cutter & Trimmer cuts the video before or after muting.
• Compress Video reduces the size of the silent video.
• Rotate & Flip Video turns the picture the right way up.