Remove audio from video file with FFmpeg

262

57

How can I strip the audio track out of a video file with FFmpeg?

Ronan Dejhero

Posted 2011-04-09T16:50:01.973

Reputation: 2 857

Answers

370

You remove audio by using the -an flag.

ffmpeg -i example.mkv -c copy -an example-nosound.mkv

Full ffmpeg documentation here.

Martin Beckett

Posted 2011-04-09T16:50:01.973

Reputation: 6 073

I'm a bash and ffmpeg newbie but I put this answer together with some other pieces to create function ffsilent { ffmpeg -i $1 -c copy -an "$1-nosound.${1#*.}" } which you can use in your profile to quickly create a silent version of any video file. – Aaron – 2019-12-16T15:18:09.607

103

You probably don't want to reencode the video (a slow and lossy process), so try:

ffmpeg -i [input_file] -vcodec copy -an [output_file]

(n.b. some Linux distributions now come with the avconv fork of ffmpeg)

John Mellor

Posted 2011-04-09T16:50:01.973

Reputation: 1 311

1This didn't make any difference to me compared to the accepted solution. – nidi – 2017-12-29T00:49:09.040

2vcodec is an alias for -c:v, so specifically it'd copy the video stream only. The only data you're preventing with this would be subtitles, metadata, etc from what I can see. – Rogue – 2018-03-08T15:48:27.777

In other words, this solution can conceivably lose more information than the accepted solution. – Alex – 2020-02-25T15:12:21.050

9

avconv -i [input_file] -vcodec copy -an [output_file]

If you cannot install ffmpeg because of existing of avconv try that .

Abdennour TOUMI

Posted 2011-04-09T16:50:01.973

Reputation: 211

Asked: 2011-04-09T16:50:01.973

Viewed: 243 067 times

Active: 2016-08-12T01:03:58.923