How to mute a video on Windows

Mute a video with Clipchamp

Clipchamp is Microsoft’s video editor. It comes with Windows 11 and can be installed from the Microsoft Store on Windows 10. Its timeline has a mute control on every clip that contains sound.

1. Open Clipchamp from the Start menu and create a new video.
2. Import your file: drag it into the media area or use the import media button.
3. Drag the video from your media onto the timeline.
4. Click the clip on the timeline to select it. If the clip has sound, a speaker icon appears on its left side.
5. Click the speaker icon. It changes to a speaker with a cross, which means the clip is muted.
6. Click Export, choose a resolution no higher than your original, and wait for the export to finish. The exported video is silent.

Clipchamp has two other options in the audio tab of the property panel on the right: a volume slider you can drag to zero, and a detach audio button that moves the sound to its own row on the timeline so you can delete it.

What exporting from an editor does to quality

Any video editor, Clipchamp included, renders a brand new video when you export. The picture is decoded and compressed again with the export settings you choose. For a phone clip shared on social media you will rarely notice, but the file can end up with a different bitrate, size or format than the original, and a MOV usually comes out as an MP4.

If you only want to get rid of the sound, you don’t need to re-encode anything. A video file stores picture and audio as separate tracks, and a tool can copy the picture track byte for byte into a new file and leave the audio out. That is called a stream copy, and it is the method to prefer when quality matters or the file is large.

Remove the audio track without re-encoding

On Windows you have three practical ways to do a stream copy:

• ffmpeg, a free command-line tool. One short command removes the audio and copies the video as it is.
• VLC, which can convert a file with a profile that keeps the original video track and turns audio off. It works, but its converter is less predictable than ffmpeg.
• A browser tool that rewrites the file locally. MuteVideo works this way for MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and AVI files.

With ffmpeg installed, open Command Prompt or PowerShell in the folder that contains your video and run:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -an output.mp4

Here -c copy copies the streams without encoding them and -an leaves out the audio. Our ffmpeg guide covers MKV files with several tracks and muting a whole folder.

Check that the sound is really gone

Turning the volume down in Media Player or muting a clip in the Photos app only affects playback, not the file. To confirm the new file is silent, play it with your speakers on, then right-click it in File Explorer, choose Properties and open the Details tab. A file without an audio track shows no values in the audio fields such as bit rate and channels.

Keep the original until you have checked the muted copy. Neither Clipchamp nor ffmpeg can add the sound back once you delete the source file.