Mute Video

Remove sound from a clip in your browser, and get back a copy with no audio stream at all.

Runs on your deviceVideoWorkingNo account needed

What this tool does

Mute Video plays your clip through an off-screen video element, captures the picture as it runs, and records that stream to a new file with no audio track attached. What comes back is not a silenced track sitting at zero gain — there is simply no audio stream in the output for a player, an editor or an upload form to find. The source file on your disk is never modified.

Discarding an audio stream while leaving the picture byte-for-byte intact is a remux, and browsers have no remuxer, so the frames are re-encoded on the way through. Two consequences follow, and both are worth knowing before you start. The output is WebM — VP9 where the browser's recorder offers it, VP8 where it does not, and on a browser that advertises neither by name whatever codec it puts inside WebM by default — whatever the input container was, so a muted MP4 comes back as a .webm file. And the encode runs in real time, because the clip has to be played to be captured: a twelve-minute video takes roughly twelve minutes, with the tab in front. The quality selector sets the bitrate for that encode at 8, 4 or 1.5 Mbps, or hands the decision to the browser.

All of this happens inside the tab, so the video is not sent anywhere and the tool keeps working with the network switched off. The limit that follows from that is your browser's own decoder: frames are read from a real video element, so AVI, WMV, FLV, MPG, MPEG and TS files will not open at all, MKV opens only when it holds VP8, VP9 or AV1, and MOV opens only for H.264 or HEVC — ProRes and the other editing codecs are refused. When a file will not decode, the tool names the reason rather than handing you an empty download.

How to use it

  1. Choose one video. One file per job. The picker lists the common video extensions, but the ones that actually work are those this browser can play: MP4, WebM, OGV, and MOV or MKV holding a codec it understands.
  2. Pick a bitrate for the re-encode. High, the starting choice, is 8 Mbps; Medium is 4 Mbps and Small file 1.5 Mbps. The fourth option leaves the rate to the browser's recorder, which usually aims lower than High. Whichever you pick is a request rather than a cap: if the recorder rejects the settings the tool starts it again at the browser's own rate instead of failing, and the file you get back is then not the size the preset implies.
  3. Leave the tab in front while it runs. Playback and capture happen at normal speed, so allow about the clip's own duration. Some browsers stop delivering frames from a backgrounded tab, which ends the recording early.
  4. Save the silent copy. The download keeps your original filename with -muted appended and a .webm extension. Frame size comes through unchanged; the container and the video codec do not.

Processing & privacy

Runs on your device. Your file is processed directly in this browser.

Common use cases

Footage carrying music you do not own

A clip whose background is somebody else's recording attracts an automated copyright claim the moment it is uploaded. Removing the audio removes the match.

A screen recording that caught the room

Capture tools take the microphone by default, so a demo often ships with a phone call, a colleague talking, or a notification chime nobody meant to publish.

Video for a slide or a looping banner

Footage placed behind a presentation or set to autoplay on a page should carry no sound of its own, so it cannot startle a room or a reader.

Trimming weight from a reference copy

Dropping the audio and encoding at Small file usually produces a much lighter file to email or archive, though a clip that was already heavily compressed can come out larger than it went in.

Questions

Does the clip leave my computer to be muted?
No. Decoding, capture and encoding all happen in this browser tab, so the file is not transmitted and the tool still runs with the connection dropped. Server-based video tools on this site, such as Merge Videos, are labelled as such.
Why is the result a WebM and not an MP4?
Because the browser's recorder writes WebM and nothing else here. Removing the audio stream without re-encoding would need a remuxer, which the browser does not provide, so the picture is encoded again — as VP9, as VP8, or as whatever else the recorder puts inside a WebM container — regardless of what you fed in.
Why does it take as long as the video is long?
The clip is played through and the frames are captured as they render, which is the only route a browser offers. A ten-minute video therefore needs about ten minutes. You can cancel partway, but there is no fast mode.
Will the picture look identical?
Not exactly. Re-encoding is generation loss, and how visible it is depends on the bitrate you pick against the detail and motion in the source. The pixel dimensions are preserved; the pixels themselves are recreated.
Which browsers can do this?
It needs MediaRecorder plus frame capture from a video element. Chrome, Edge and Firefox provide both. Where either is missing the tool says so and stops, instead of writing a file that will not play.
Can I turn the volume down instead of removing it?
Not with this tool — it writes no audio stream whatsoever. Change Volume adjusts the gain of an audio file, and Video to MP3 does the opposite job of keeping the sound and discarding the picture.
My AVI will not open. What now?
Browsers cannot decode AVI, WMV, FLV or MPEG program streams, so there are no frames to capture. Run the file through Convert Video first to get an MP4 or WebM, then mute that.

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