How to remove sound from a video
- Drop the video on the box above — MP4, MOV or WebM, up to 2 GB.
- The tool checks for an audio track first. If the file is already silent — common for Mac screen recordings made without a microphone — it tells you.
- Click Remove audio. The result confirms that the video was copied without re-encoding.
- Play it to check, then download the MP4.
Why the picture doesn’t change
Audio and video live in separate tracks inside a video file. Removing the sound means writing a new file that contains only the video track — the encoded frames are copied exactly as they were, not decoded and re-compressed. That is why there is no generation loss, no change in resolution or frame rate, and why a 13.6 MB iPhone clip took 0.3 seconds in Chrome and 0.4 seconds in WebKit, the engine behind Safari.
The new file is a little smaller than the original — 13.2 MB instead of 13.6 MB for that clip — because the audio data is gone. Everything else, down to the codec, is the same. The output is always an MP4, even from a MOV or WebM, since MP4 is the container that plays most widely.
When a silent video is what you want
- A screen recording caught something it shouldn’t — a notification chime, typing, a colleague in the background.
- You’ll add sound later — music, a voiceover or captions in an editor — and want to start from a clean track.
- Background video on a website, where the clip plays muted anyway and the audio is just extra weight.
- Sharing footage without private conversation that happened while it was recorded.
Related jobs
To cut the video shorter as well, trim it with the Video Trimmer — its Fast mode is also lossless. To make the silent file smaller for sharing, use the Video Compressor and set Audio to Remove; it re-encodes the picture at a lower resolution and bitrate in the same step. Both run in your browser like this one, so the file still never leaves your computer.
Check whether a video has sound
Before removing anything, it is worth knowing what is there. This tool reports it as soon as you drop a file — “with audio” or “no audio” next to the size and length. In QuickTime Player, Window › Show Movie Inspector lists every track in the file. Screen recordings made with the macOS screenshot toolbar only include sound if a microphone was chosen in its Options menu, so many of them are silent already.
Other ways on a Mac
QuickTime Player: open the video, choose Edit › Remove Audio, then File › Export As at the video’s own resolution. Export As writes a newly encoded file, so it takes longer than a copy, but it needs nothing installed.
ffmpeg in Terminal does exactly what this tool does — copies the video and leaves the audio out — with one line. On our iPhone test clip it produced a file with the HEVC video intact and no audio stream:
ffmpeg -i clip.mov -map 0:v:0 -c:v copy -an clip-silent.mp4-c:v copy keeps the picture untouched and -an drops the audio. The -map 0:v:0 part keeps only the main video track; iPhone clips also carry small metadata tracks alongside the video and sound, and this leaves them out.
Removing the audio vs muting it
Muting in an editor usually keeps an audio track and fills it with silence, so players still show a volume control and the file still carries the track. Removing it, as this tool does, leaves no audio track at all: the MP4 contains the video stream only. That makes the file slightly smaller and removes any chance of the original sound surviving somewhere in the file — worth knowing when the reason for removing it is privacy. If a site you upload to insists on an audio track, add a silent one in an editor instead.
