How to remove the sound from a video
- Drop an MP4, MOV, M4V or WebM into the box above. The In this file panel lists the picture and every sound track, with its codec and roughly how much of the file it takes up.
- Press Remove sound.
- Read What came out: how many video frames were compared with the original and how many matched, and the size before and after.
- Play it on the page to check there is no sound, then download.
Copying the picture, and proving it
A video file is a container holding separate streams: one for the picture, one or more for sound. Removing the sound does not need the picture to be touched at all. The compressed frames can be lifted out of the old container and written into a new one without being decoded, which is fast and costs no quality.
Not every tool does that. The easy way to build a muting tool is to put the video through a general-purpose converter with the sound switched off, and a converter re-encodes by default. The result looks nearly the same, is often a different size, and has lost a little detail that will not come back. From the outside you cannot tell which kind of tool you used.
So after writing the new file, this page reads it back and compares each compressed video frame with the matching frame in your original, byte for byte. With our 12-second, 1080p test clip (360 frames, 8 Mbps H.264 with AAC sound, 12.16 MB):
| What we checked | Result |
|---|---|
| Video frames identical to the original | 360 of 360 |
| Codec description (the decoder settings stored in the file) | identical |
| Size before → after | 12.16 MB → 11.97 MB |
| Time to write the new file | under 0.1 s |
| Portrait clip stored with 90° rotation | rotation kept |
The frame comparison above was also made independently of this page: our test suite parses the output file with its own MP4 reader and compares the raw bytes of every sample, so the check does not rely on the same code that wrote the file.
Why the file barely shrinks
The drop in size is only the sound: about 0.2 MB in the test above, because 12 seconds of 128 kbps AAC is small next to 12 seconds of 1080p picture. On a typical phone video the sound is roughly 1 MB per minute. If the reason you are muting is to get under an upload limit, muting will rarely be enough; Compress video re-encodes the picture to a size you choose and measures the result.
Sideways videos and second sound tracks
Phones record vertical video sideways and store a rotation note in the file. Since the picture is copied here, the note goes with it; our tests check that a portrait clip comes out with its 90° rotation intact. Files with more than one sound track, which some cameras and screen recorders write, have all of them removed, and the page reports how many.
Everything happens in your browser. The video is not uploaded, there is no size limit, and there is no account. If the picture stream in your file cannot be copied into a new file as it is, the page says so and leaves the video alone rather than falling back to a re-encode.