Mute Video

Background noise, wind, private conversations or copyrighted music often make a clip unusable as it is. Muting it lets you post it safely, use it as a silent background on a website or in a presentation, or add your own music or narration in an editor. Social networks may also block or mute videos with copyrighted music, and removing it first avoids that.

Silent videos are also needed for website hero backgrounds: browsers only autoplay videos that are muted, and a file without sound is a little smaller.

A video file holds separate tracks for the picture and the sound. The tool writes a new file with only the picture track, copying its compressed data unchanged into an MP4 (for H.264 and H.265 video) or WebM (for VP8, VP9 and AV1). Nothing is decoded or re-compressed, which is why it is fast and lossless.

This tool removes the sound from the whole video. To silence only a section, cut the video into parts with the Video Cutter, mute the part you want silent, and join them again with the Video Merger. To keep the sound but make it quieter, use the Audio Volume tool on the video's sound.

Your video is read and written by your own browser using its built-in video support. It is never sent to a server, so private family videos and work recordings stay on your device. Very large files depend on the memory of your device; on a phone, videos up to a few hundred megabytes work best.

Once the original sound is gone, you can put your own soundtrack under the picture in any video editor, including the free editors that come with Windows, macOS, iOS and Android. Choose music that you have the right to use, such as tracks from royalty-free libraries or the music libraries built into social apps, to avoid copyright claims. For a voice-over, record it with the Voice Recorder tool while watching the silent video, then combine the two in the editor. Keeping a muted copy of a clip is also useful when you want to reuse the same footage several times with different music, because each edit then starts from a clean, silent picture rather than from a mix you would have to fade out.