How to mute multiple videos at once

What the built-in tools can and can’t do

The tools that come with your devices are built for one clip at a time. On an iPhone, the Photos app mutes a single video (Edit, then the speaker icon). On a Mac, QuickTime Player removes the sound from the open movie with Edit > Remove Audio. On Windows, Clipchamp mutes a clip on its timeline, and you then export each video separately.

That’s fine for two or three files. For a folder of twenty clips from a trip, a shoot or a screen-recording session, repeating those steps is slow, and editors like Clipchamp re-encode the video on export, which takes time and can lower quality. A batch method avoids both problems.

Mute a folder of videos with FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a free command-line tool that runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The commands below drop the audio from every MP4 in a folder and copy the video stream unchanged, so each file takes seconds rather than minutes.

1. Install FFmpeg using one of the builds linked from ffmpeg.org, and make sure the ffmpeg command works in your terminal.
2. Put the videos you want to mute in one folder.
3. Open a terminal in that folder (PowerShell on Windows, Terminal on macOS or Linux).
4. Run the command for your system. It creates a subfolder called muted and writes a silent copy of each file there, with the same name.
5. Open a few of the new files and confirm there’s no sound before you delete or replace anything.

Windows (PowerShell):

New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force muted | Out-Null
Get-ChildItem *.mp4 | ForEach-Object { ffmpeg -i $_.FullName -c copy -an "muted\$($_.Name)" }

macOS or Linux (Terminal):

mkdir -p muted
for f in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c copy -an "muted/$f"; done

In both commands, -an removes the audio and -c copy copies the remaining streams without re-encoding them. Your originals are never modified.

For other formats, change *.mp4 to *.mov, *.mkv or *.webm and run the command again. Because the output keeps the original extension, each file stays in its own container.

Mute several videos in the browser

If you don’t want to install anything, a browser batch tool does the same job. MuteVideo accepts up to 20 files at once and processes them one after another on your own device, without uploading them. MP4, MOV and M4V files can be up to 4 GB each; WebM, MKV and AVI use a downloadable engine (about 31 MB, fetched once) with a limit of 500 MB per file on desktop and 150 MB on mobile.

1. Open the batch page and choose or drop all the videos at once.
2. Wait while each file is processed in turn; the audio is removed and the picture is copied as-is.
3. Download each file, or download all results as one ZIP (the ZIP must total under 4 GB).

Check the results before deleting originals

• Play the start and end of a few files with your volume up to confirm they’re silent.
• Compare file sizes: a muted copy is usually a little smaller than the original, depending on how much space the audio took.
• Keep the originals until you’ve checked every file. A stream copy can’t bring audio back once you delete the source.
• Whether location and camera tags carry over depends on the tool; FFmpeg keeps some metadata by default and can drop phone-specific tags. If you plan to share the files publicly, check what’s left and decide whether to remove it.