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
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools FontChecker Plugin

    There's a very interesting piece of code on Google Code called FontAvailable which does a jQuery-based JavaScript check on a string to check whether or not your system has a specific font based upon its output width. I've ported this functionality to MooTools. The MooTools...

  • By
    Spatial Navigation

    Spatial navigation is the ability to navigate to focusable elements based on their position in a given space.  Spatial navigation is a must when your site or app must respond to arrow keys, a perfect example being a television with directional pad remote.  Firefox OS TV apps are simply...

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!