Free video and audio tools that run in your browser

Which tool do you actually need?

People arrive here with a problem rather than a tool in mind. The recording is two hours long and only ninety seconds matter. The file will not attach. Somebody wants the audio and not the picture. Here is the shortest route from the problem to the answer.

The search box takes plain words. Typing shorten finds the trimmer, typing sound finds the audio extractor, because it matches what each tool does rather than only what it is called.

The one thing to understand about browser media tools

Everything on this page is shaped by a single constraint, and knowing it makes the tools far less mysterious.

A browser can only open the formats it can already play. That means MP4, M4V, MOV and WebM for video, and MP3, M4A, WAV and OGG for audio. It covers nearly every phone recording, screen capture and camera export in existence.

What it does not cover is MKV, AVI, WMV and FLV. Browsers have never shipped decoders for those, and no browser based tool can change it. If you have one of those files, convert it to MP4 in any desktop video application first and everything here will read it happily. The tools say so plainly when they meet one, rather than sitting on a spinner while you wonder.

Why trimming takes as long as the clip

This surprises people, so it is worth explaining rather than leaving as an oddity.

There are two ways to cut a video. The first copies the frames you want into a new container without touching them. It is instant and loses nothing, and it is what desktop editors do when you choose a lossless cut. It needs a full video engine, and the only one that runs in a browser carries a licence that does not suit a commercial site.

The second plays the section and records it as it goes. That is the approach here. A thirty second cut takes about thirty seconds, and the video is encoded again rather than copied. In exchange nothing is uploaded, there is no queue, no account and no watermark.

Neither method is secretly better. They trade different things, and knowing which one you are using stops the waiting from feeling like a fault. For cutting five minutes out of an hour long file, a desktop application is genuinely the better tool.

Choosing between audio, video and GIF

The same recording can leave here in three different shapes, and picking the right one saves a lot of trouble.

Audio, when the picture adds nothing

Lectures, interviews, meetings, sermons and podcasts recorded on camera. The picture is usually the heaviest part of the file and the least useful part of the content. A one hour lecture might be 900 MB as video and 28 MB as speech quality audio, with every word identical.

Audio also travels better. It plays in the background, it works in a car, and transcription services almost all prefer it.

Trimmed video, when the picture matters

Demonstrations, evidence, anything where seeing is the point. Keep it short. A clip that needs to be watched has to earn the click, and thirty focused seconds beats four rambling minutes every time.

GIF, when it has to play without being clicked

Bug reports, feature demonstrations, documentation, reactions. A GIF starts moving the moment somebody scrolls past it, while a video sits there as a still frame waiting for a click that often never comes.

The trade is size and quality. GIF holds a maximum of 256 colours per frame, has no sound at all, and stores every frame as a separate picture. It survives because instant playback beats better compression in the places people use it.

Getting file sizes under control

Most media problems are size problems. These are the ceilings people run into and the order to attack them in.

• Consumer email usually stops around twenty to twenty five megabytes for the whole message, not per attachment.
• Corporate mail servers are often stricter, and the limit is set by a policy you cannot see.
• Chat apps and forums tend to refuse or silently downgrade anything past about five megabytes.
• Issue trackers are frequently tighter still, around two.

Work through it in this order. Trim first, because removing seconds removes proportionally everything. Then ask whether the picture is needed at all, since dropping to audio removes most of the file in one move. Only then start reducing quality. Cutting two seconds off a GIF helps more than any amount of fiddling with the frame rate.

Recording so the result is worth keeping

None of these tools can add what was never captured. Five minutes of thought before you press record saves an hour afterwards.

• Get the microphone close. Distance is the single biggest cause of hollow, echoing audio, and no setting fixes it later.
• Choose a room with soft surfaces. Curtains, carpet and furniture absorb the reflections that turn speech into mush.
• Turn off anything humming. Fans, air conditioning and fridges make steady noise that survives compression perfectly, which is exactly what you do not want.
• Check system audio is on before a screen recording. A silent capture is the most common problem people bring to an audio tool, and the sound was never there to begin with.
• Test for ten seconds and listen back before committing to a two hour session.

A few practical notes

Speech needs far less than music

Human speech carries almost no useful information in stereo, because one voice comes from one place. Recording it in mono at 64 kbps preserves everything that makes words intelligible. A lecture at that setting sounds the same as the same recording five times larger, and it fits on any device without thought. Reach for higher settings only when the recording genuinely contains music you care about.

GIFs have no sound, ever

The format has no provision for audio at all, so no tool can add it. If the sound matters, use a short video, or pull the audio out separately and share it alongside.

Length is limited by your device, not by us

All the work happens in memory on your own machine. An hour of audio converts comfortably on a normal laptop and most phones manage it. Video is heavier, so a long clip on a phone will struggle. Where a tool has a sensible ceiling it tells you the number and the reason rather than failing partway through, and splitting a very long recording in half solves it nearly every time.

Using this responsibly

Whether you may take the audio or a clip from a video depends entirely on what it is and who owns it.

Your own recordings, lectures you had permission to record, footage you shot, meetings you were part of, and material published under a licence that allows reuse are all straightforward. Copying a soundtrack from somebody else’s film, television programme or music release is not, whatever tool is used to do it.

These tools exist for the first group: your own recordings, your own meetings, your own classes. If you are unsure about a particular file, the useful test is whether you would be comfortable explaining to the person who made it what you did with it.

Why none of this leaves your device

Think about what people actually put through media tools. Recorded staff meetings where colleagues spoke freely. Screen captures showing internal dashboards and customer data. Interviews with sources. Medical consultations. Family video. Footage from a doorbell camera for an insurance claim.

The usual route is to upload all of it to a free website, wait in a queue behind everybody else, and download a watermarked result. Your recording then sits on hardware you cannot inspect, for a period set by a policy you have not read, at a company you found through a search result ten minutes earlier.

Everything here is opened by your own browser and written on your own machine. Nothing goes out. Open the network panel in your developer tools and watch it run if you would rather see that than be told it. There is a practical benefit as well: a nine hundred megabyte video starts immediately rather than crawling up your connection first, and once the page has loaded the tools keep working with the connection off.

Beyond media

If what you actually need is the words rather than the sound, our speech to text tool transcribes a recording without uploading it, and the rest of the text and speech tools handle the jobs around it. Slides and handouts that go with a recording belong in the PDF tools, and any images you pull out of a clip can be tidied up with the image tools.