Remove Audio From Video

By  on  

Sometimes I want to display live motion without the audio, since the audio is either bad quality or it's just extra load, which is especially important on mobile.  You could probably argue converting the video to GIF is more appropriate, but GIFs can be larger and more taxing on the device.  You also cannot pause or control animated GIFs.

The better solution may be to remove the audio from a video:

./ffmpeg -i MusicVideo.webm -vcodec copy -an MusicVideoNoAudio.webm

The -an option removes the the audio from the input file, producing a video without any audio.  The sample file below went from 5.4MB to 4.1MB and now you don't hear the annoying wind in the background.

Recent Features

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

  • By
    Interview with a Pornhub Web Developer

    Regardless of your stance on pornography, it would be impossible to deny the massive impact the adult website industry has had on pushing the web forward. From pushing the browser's video limits to pushing ads through WebSocket so ad blockers don't detect them, you have...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WebKit Marquee CSS:  Bringin’ Sexy Back

    We all joke about the days of Web yesteryear.  You remember them:  stupid animated GIFs (flames and "coming soon" images, most notably), lame counters, guestbooks, applets, etc.  Another "feature" we thought we had gotten rid of was the marquee.  The marquee was a rudimentary, javascript-like...

  • By
    HTML5’s placeholder Attribute

    HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser;  some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful.  One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements.  The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...

Discussion

  1. If you wanted to you can extract the audio from the video. If you needed the audio for something else.

    ffmpeg -i sample.avi -vn -acodec 'copy' sample-audio.aac
    

    Thanks for the tutorial!

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!