Remove audio from a video (mute a video)

How to use it

1. Choose a video — MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and more all work.
2. Press Remove sound. The audio track is dropped and the video is copied as-is.
3. The muted video downloads in the same format it went in.

Dropping a stream is an edit to the wrapper, not to the picture

An MP4 or MKV is a container: an index describing where each stream’s packets live, followed by the packets themselves. Removing the sound means writing a new index listing only the video packets and copying those across untouched. No frame is ever decoded, which is why the job takes roughly as long as reading the file and writing it back, and why the picture is not merely close to the original but identical to it.

It also sets a realistic expectation about size. Audio is normally a small share of a video file: a 128 kbps AAC track against an 8 Mbps H.264 stream is under two per cent of the bytes. Muting a clip to remove the sound works perfectly; muting it to shrink it will disappoint. The exception is a file built the other way round, such as a low-bitrate screen recording carrying uncompressed audio.

Three reasons the silent version is the one you want

Browsers and mobile feeds refuse to autoplay video with sound until a visitor has interacted with the page. Sites work around that with a muted attribute, but that is a player setting a visitor can undo. For a background hero video or a looping product demo, a file with no audio track removes any chance of a page making a noise at someone in an open-plan office.

The second reason is what was said off camera. Screen recordings and phone clips capture room conversation the person filming has stopped noticing, and it travels with the file to everyone who receives it. The third is automated copyright matching, which fingerprints the audio, so music faintly audible behind a clip can flag it on the track alone. Stripping the audio settles all three, though metadata such as creation time and device stays put.

Questions