Remove the sound from a video — keep the picture untouched

How to use the video muter

1. Drop a video onto the box or click to choose one.
2. Leave Output format on Same as the original, or pick MP4, WebM, MOV or MKV.
3. Press Remove audio.
4. Play the silent result in the page to check it, then download it. The file name ends in -muted.

What it does and when to use it

There are plenty of reasons to drop a sound track: background chatter or wind noise you do not want to share, music you do not have the rights to post, a screen recording that caught a notification sound, or a clip that will get a fresh voice-over or soundtrack in an editor. A silent file also avoids surprises on pages that autoplay video, since browsers usually allow autoplay only for muted video.

If you want to keep the sound separately, save it first with the video to audio extractor. When the clip will loop on a website, the video looper can repeat it, and the video compressor has its own “Remove audio” choice if you also want a smaller file.

How it works

The tool opens the file with Mediabunny in a background worker of your browser, tells it to discard the audio track, and writes every video packet into a new container without decoding it. Because nothing is decoded or encoded, it is usually done in seconds, even for long clips, and works on phones as well as computers. The file is never uploaded.

If you choose a different Output format and the existing video codec cannot be stored in it, for example H.264 video going into WebM, the picture is re-encoded with your browser’s WebCodecs encoder. That is slower and changes the quality a little.

Worked examples

• A phone clip with wind noise. An MP4 from a phone, Output format left as Same as the original. The result is an MP4 with the same H.264 picture and no audio track, ready for music in an editor.
• A WebM screen recording. Keep it as WebM and the VP8 or VP9 picture is copied straight across.
• Changing format at the same time. An MOV from an iPhone with Output format set to MP4 is copied across too, because both containers can hold the same video codecs.

Limits and tips

• The whole file is assembled in memory before you can save it, so very large files may fail on phones with little free memory.
• AVI, WMV and FLV files are not read by this tool; convert them first with the video converter.
• Need only part of the clip? Cut it with the video trimmer and mute the shorter result.