Remove the audio from a video
Strip the sound track and leave the picture exactly as it was.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
Why this one is instant
Removing audio does not require re-encoding anything. The video stream is copied byte for byte and the audio stream is left out, so a two hour file finishes about as fast as your disk can read it, and the picture quality is untouched.
If you want to replace the audio rather than remove it, mute the video here first, then use the merge tools.
What the command is actually doing
The command panel shows -c copy -an. -c copy tells FFmpeg not to decode anything, just to lift the existing streams out of one container and write them into another. -an says to leave the audio behind. Nothing is decompressed, no encoder runs, and not a single pixel is recalculated. It is closer to a file operation than to video processing, which is why the progress bar tends to shoot across in one go.
This also means the tool is safe on footage you care about. There is no generation loss, no quality setting to get wrong, and no way for it to soften the picture, because the picture never enters an encoder. The output is bit-for-bit the same video stream that went in.
The reasons people usually want this
- Music you cannot clear. A clip with a radio playing in the background will get claimed or muted by the platform anyway. Removing the track yourself means you control what replaces it.
- A conversation you did not mean to record. Phone video picks up everything said near the person holding it. Muting is the fastest way to make a clip shareable, and unlike blurring, it is complete.
- Wind and handling noise. Outdoor footage is often unusable on the audio side. If the plan is music over the top, the original track is only in the way.
- A silent background loop. Anything destined to autoplay on a web page should carry no audio stream at all, rather than a silent one, since some browsers treat the presence of a track as a reason to block autoplay.
If you want the sound rather than the picture, extract audio does the opposite job with the same efficiency. To keep the track but bring it down instead of removing it, use change volume.
Common questions
Does this reduce quality?
Not at all. The video stream is copied without being decoded or re-encoded.
Why is the file barely smaller?
Audio is usually a few percent of a video file. The picture is where the bytes are.
Is muting the same as setting the volume to zero?
No, and the difference matters. Setting volume to zero leaves a silent audio stream in the file, which still occupies space and still counts as a track to any software checking for one. This removes the stream entirely, so the file genuinely has no audio in it.
Can I mute only part of a video?
Not with this tool, which works on the whole file. Cut the section out with cut video, mute that piece and rejoin it, or use the editor, which can silence the source audio across a marked stretch of the timeline.
Does this work on MKV and AVI files?
Yes. Because the streams are copied rather than converted, almost any container works and the output keeps the container it came in. The only failure case is a container that cannot legally hold the video codec inside it, which is rare with real files.