Mute Video
Mute a video by dropping its audio tracks while the picture is copied across without re-encoding, so a two-minute clip finishes in seconds and the frames come back identical.
Runs entirely in your browser — your files and text never leave your device.
Drag & drop your file here, or
Removes the audio track and keeps the picture exactly as-is — no quality loss, and it's near-instant.
Working on your device — keep this tab open until it finishes.
How to use
- Put the clip in the Video field. It loads into a preview player, which is the fastest way to confirm you grabbed the right take.
- Press Mute & download. A progress bar runs alongside a Cancel button, and the tab has to stay open until it finishes.
- Play the result in the panel that appears, then take the Download button. The file saves as muted.mp4, or muted.webm when the source was VP8 or VP9.
About this tool
Sometimes the picture is fine and the sound is the problem. A radio playing behind a demo. A colleague's phone call two desks away. Music you have no licence to publish. Muting removes the audio from the video and leaves every frame exactly where it was.
There is no encoding pass. The video track is copied straight out of the source file and into a new container, which is why a long clip finishes in seconds instead of the minutes a compressor would want, and why the muted copy decodes to the same pixels you started with.
The container it lands in is chosen by the codec. VP8 and VP9 clips come back as muted.webm; everything else, H.264 and HEVC included, comes back as muted.mp4. So a MOV off an iPhone arrives as an MP4. That is usually what you wanted anyway, but it is worth knowing before you hand the file to someone who asked for a .mov.
Muting leans on the browser's WebCodecs engine, so Chrome and Edge are the safe bets, with recent Safari and Firefox on desktop also fine. A greyed-out button and a warning strip at the top of the page mean that engine is missing. Keeping the soundtrack? Run the clip through Extract Audio first. Cutting it down as well? Trim Video keeps the sound.
Before you rely on it
- Every audio track goes. Keeping the narration while losing the background music is a job for an editor with two tracks and a fader.
- The output container follows the video codec rather than your source, so a MOV or an MKV comes back as an MP4. If the destination insists on the original extension, put the muted file through the Video Converter afterwards.
- Copying the video track only works while the new container will accept the codec it is already in. An unusual codec forces a real re-encode, which is slower and no longer pixel-for-pixel.
- The whole output is assembled in memory before you get a download, so a very large file can run into your device's limits and fail rather than degrade.
Frequently asked questions
Will muting make the video look worse?
It shouldn't. The encoded frames are copied over rather than decoded and re-encoded, so what comes out is what went in. The one exception is a source codec the output container cannot hold, which forces a genuine re-encode.
Why did my .mov come back as an .mp4?
The output container is picked from the video codec rather than from the file you handed over. VP8 and VP9 go to WebM, everything else goes to MP4, so an H.264 MOV becomes muted.mp4. The picture is untouched either way.
How long does a big file take?
Seconds, usually. With no encoding pass the work is bounded by how fast the file can be read and rewritten, so a 4K clip is barely slower than a 720p one of the same length.
The Mute & download button is greyed out. What now?
Support is checked before anything is enabled, and a browser missing the VideoEncoder and VideoDecoder APIs gets a warning strip instead of a working button. Chrome and Edge have them. Recent desktop Safari and Firefox do too. Older browsers and some mobile ones don't.
Can I save the soundtrack before I strip it?
Run the same clip through Extract Audio first. It writes M4A, Opus, WAV or FLAC, with M4A selected by default. Mute the original here afterwards and you end up with the picture and the sound as two separate files.
What happens if the clip has no audio to begin with?
It still runs and you get a copy back, since there was nothing there to discard in the first place. All that changes is the container. If a container change is what you were after, the Video Converter is the better tool for it.
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