Remove the sound from a video in this tab
TubePull Mute Video deletes every audio track from a video file and hands back the same video with no sound. It runs inside your browser, on a computer or a phone. Nothing is uploaded: the video stays on your device, you don't need an account, and nothing is stamped on the picture. You don't have to set anything. Press Start and the tool writes a new file that holds each video packet exactly as it was, with the audio left out. The picture is never decoded or compressed a second time, so the muted video looks just like the original. It also stays in its original format: an MOV comes back as an MOV, an MKV as an MKV.
What the muted file keeps
| In your video | In the muted file |
|---|---|
| Video tracks | All of them, with every packet copied unchanged at its original timestamp |
| Audio tracks | None. Every one is removed, including second languages and commentary |
| Format | The same container as your file, recognised from its content rather than its name |
| Length and timing | Unchanged: the frames keep their times, so the length matches to within one frame |
| Titles, dates and other tags | Kept, with the original recording date. The day you muted it isn't added |
| Cover art | Kept in MP4 and MOV files |
| Chapters | Kept when the compatibility engine does the job; left out when the file is muted in the page |
| Subtitle and data tracks | Left out |
When the job is done, the result confirms that the video was copied without re-encoding and that no quality was lost. The download keeps your file's name and adds "-muted" before the extension, for example beach-muted.mov. Because tags stay, any location or camera details recorded in a phone video can stay too. Muting removes what people hear, not where or how the clip was filmed. To strip those details as well, run the muted file through the Video Metadata Remover.
Why muting doesn't lower the quality
A video file is a container with separate tracks inside: one or more for the picture and, usually, one or more for the sound. To mute it, the tool builds a new container from the picture tracks alone. The compressed video data goes across as it is, so there is no extra round of compression to soften details, and the resolution, frame rate and bitrate don't change. The codec makes no difference. H.264, HEVC (H.265), VP8, VP9, AV1, MPEG-4 Part 2 and Windows Media video are all copied rather than decoded, so the muting itself doesn't depend on your browser being able to play that codec. Expect the muted file to be a little smaller than the original, by roughly the space the sound used. In most videos the picture takes far more room than the audio, so the saving is modest.
Videos you can mute
You can mute MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, FLV, WMV, MPEG-TS and 3GP files. That covers clips from iPhones and Android phones, cameras, screen recorders and older Windows software. The format is worked out from the data in the file, so a Matroska video that was saved with a .mp4 name is still treated as MKV and downloads with an .mkv extension. Two kinds of file stop before the job starts. If a video has no sound at all, which is common with screen recordings and drone footage, a message says it is already silent, the file stays loaded and Start stays off. If a file has no picture, for example one that holds only sound and cover art, a message says it has no video.
Why people mute videos
- Background loops for a website, a shop display or a slide deck. A file without an audio track has no sound to switch off, and Safari, for one, lets a video with no audio track start on a web page without a tap.
- Private sound. Phone footage picks up nearby conversations, a TV or traffic. Taking the track out removes that sound from the file you share, which turning the volume down in a player doesn't do.
- Music you can't use. When a clip has a song in the background that you have no rights to, a silent copy is a clean starting point for adding licensed music or a voice-over later in a video editor.
Muting on iPhone and Android
Photos on iPhone and Google Photos on Android both have a speaker button in their video editors, which silences a clip in your gallery. Mute Video suits a different need: a separate silent file in the video's own format to upload or send, while the original keeps its sound. The tool works in Safari, Chrome and other current mobile browsers. Pick the video with the file chooser, press Start, and save the muted copy to your phone. Phones show a warning for videos over 500 MB, but you can still go ahead.
Where the muting happens
The video is opened and muted inside this tab, and the silent file is saved from there. No network request carries the video, its name or its details. The tool's only network traffic is fetching its own program files from TubePull. Most MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM and 3GP files are rewritten right here by Mediabunny, an open-source library for reading and writing media files, so no large download is needed. MPEG-TS, FLV, AVI and WMV files go to the compatibility engine instead. It is a WebAssembly build of FFmpeg (ffmpeg.wasm), and it also takes over for any file the page can't rewrite on its own. That engine is about 32 MB; your browser fetches it the first time a mute needs it and keeps it cached after that. The licenses page names each engine's version and license and links to its source code. The two engines differ on chapters: the compatibility engine copies them into the muted file, and the in-page path leaves them out.
Limits
- The tool mutes the whole video and doesn't add new sound. If you only want the silent part, cut it out first with the Video Trimmer, then mute that clip.
- All audio tracks are removed, never just one. To keep the sound as well, save it beforehand with Video to MP3, which can also pick one track from a file that has several.
- Jobs on the compatibility engine have a ceiling of about 1.5 GB of estimated output. Here the estimate is close to the size of your file, so an MPEG-TS, FLV, AVI or WMV video larger than 1.5 GB can't be muted.
- Very large files are limited by your device's memory, and a desktop browser copes better than a phone.
- The tool takes one video at a time, and it can't open videos protected by DRM.
Got a link rather than a file?
Mute Video works on videos that are already on your device. Videos on sites such as YouTube, TikTok or Instagram need saving first: paste the link into the TubePull downloader, download the file, then open it here. Want the audio instead of the picture? Video to MP3 saves the sound as a file of its own. The other free video tools can trim a clip or convert it to MP4.