329

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

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468

You remove audio by using the -an flag.

input_file=example.mkv
output_file=example-nosound.mkv

ffmpeg -i $input_file -c copy -an $output_file

Full ffmpeg documentation here.

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  • 1
    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 Dec 16 '19 at 15:18
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    @Aaron nice, but should be function ffsilent { ffmpeg -i "$1" -c copy -an "${1%.*}-nosound.${1#*.}" } or you'll end up with "file.mp4-nosound.mp4" when using it on "file.mp4". – Alexander Revo Jul 7 '20 at 8:52
  • This doesn't carry over GPS coordinates. – Donny V Dec 8 '20 at 16:43
112

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

input_file=example.mkv
output_file=example-nosound.mkv

ffmpeg -i $input_file -vcodec copy -an $output_file

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

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  • 2
    This didn't make any difference to me compared to the accepted solution. – nidi Dec 29 '17 at 0:49
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    vcodec 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 Mar 8 '18 at 15:48
  • In other words, this solution can conceivably lose more information than the accepted solution. – Alex Feb 25 '20 at 15:12
9
avconv -i [input_file] -vcodec copy -an [output_file]

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

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1

I put together a short code snippet that automates the process of removing audio from videos files for a whole directory that contains video files:

FILES=/{videos_dir}/*
output_dir=/{no_audio_dir}
for input_file in $FILES
do
  file_name=$(basename $input_file)
  output_file="$output_dir/$file_name"
  ffmpeg -i $input_file -c copy -an $output_file
done

I hope this one helps!

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