Remove Silence from Videos with Ffmpeg
There was recently a Show HN for a program that lets one remove silence from video files [0]. I was almost certain that ffmpeg could do this... But after searching for it, it turned out I was wrong: ffmpeg can't do this out of the box, and also can't read input from an EDL file [1]. So I set out to write a solution, as simple as possible: produce a list of select filters that are applied to video and audio, and retain only the non-silent parts. The 'silencedetect' audio filter detects silences, and produces timestamps for when silences start and end. So one can pipe the output of that to a…
In plain words
This tool removes silence from video files by using FFmpeg's silencedetect audio filter to identify quiet sections, then generating FFmpeg commands with select filters to exclude them. It processes the detected silence timestamps through a Python script to create a re-encoded video without silent parts. The tool is designed for video editors and content creators who need to trim silence from recordings with minimal complexity.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
There was recently a Show HN for a program that lets one remove silence from video files [0]. I was almost certain that ffmpeg could do this... But after searching for it, it turned out I was wrong: ffmpeg can't do this out of the box, and also can't read input from an EDL file [1]. So I set out to write a solution, as simple as possible: produce a list of select filters that are applied to video and audio, and retain only the non-silent parts. The 'silencedetect' audio filter detects silences, and produces timestamps for when silences start and end. So one can pipe the output of that to a Python script, that builds an ffmpeg command with the appropriate select filters. The resulting ffmpeg command can be run to re-encode the video without the silent parts. Hope this helps. - - - Notes: 1/ I did find something somewhat similar to what I ended up doing [2], but it's complicated, and does the video encoding inside of Python. Granted, moviepy uses ffmpeg under the hood, but it's still better if ffmpeg does all the encoding directly. 2/ This solution doesn't produce a myriad of intermediary files that it would recombine afterwards; there is just one encoding of the output video file. 'silencedetect' is very fast, so all in all running this should be pretty fast. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31767830 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_decision_list [2] https://donaldfeury.xyz/remove-the-silent-parts-of-a-video-u...
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