How can I strip the audio track out of a video file with FFmpeg?
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.
answered Apr 9 '11 at 17:03
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I'm a
bashandffmpegnewbie but I put this answer together with some other pieces to createfunction 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 -
1@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 at 8:52
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
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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 Mar 8 '18 at 15:48 -
In other words, this solution can conceivably lose more information than the accepted solution. – Alex Feb 25 at 15:12
avconv -i [input_file] -vcodec copy -an [output_file]
If you cannot install ffmpeg because of existing of avconv try that .
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!
