Gratis online video- en audiotools

Video and audio editing without uploads

Almost every "free online video tool" you can find on the open web works the same way: you upload your file to the site's server, the server runs FFmpeg on it, and you download the result. The architecture is simple, and the privacy story is unsatisfying — the server has your video for at least the duration of the job, and any breach, subpoena or quiet retention policy puts the video in someone else's hands. That's especially uncomfortable for raw footage from interviews, family video, screen recordings of unreleased products, or anything else you wouldn't broadcast publicly.

The tools in this category run a different way. They use FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly (FFmpeg WASM), which lets the same FFmpeg binary that powers virtually every server-side video pipeline run inside your browser instead. Your video is loaded into memory by JavaScript, the in-browser FFmpeg processes it, and the result is offered as a download. No upload, no server-side processing, no temporary copy on someone else's disk. The trade-off: it uses your device's CPU and RAM, so very large files or very heavy operations will run slower than a beefy cloud server would. For most clip-length work — trimming, compressing, format conversion, GIF extraction, audio separation — that's a fair price for the privacy guarantee.

A short tour of the toolkit

• Video Trimmer — set start and end points and export the cut. Lossless when the source codec allows it.
• Video Compressor — reduce file size by re-encoding at a lower bitrate or different codec, with quality presets so you don't have to know FFmpeg flags.
• Video Converter — convert between MP4 (H.264 / H.265), WebM (VP9 / AV1), AVI, MOV and others. Useful when an editing app or social platform demands a specific container.
• Video Resizer — change the pixel dimensions and/or aspect ratio. Includes presets for the most common social-media sizes (1080×1920 vertical, 1080×1080 square, 1920×1080 landscape).
• Video Speed Changer — speed up or slow down from 0.25× to 4× with audio pitch correction so the audio still sounds natural.
• Video to GIF — extract a clip and export as an animated GIF (with frame-rate and palette controls because raw GIF compression for video is famously unkind without them).
• Video to Audio — extract the audio track as MP3, WAV, AAC or OGG. The most efficient way to grab the soundtrack of a podcast or talk-recording video.
• Video to Text — transcribe spoken audio using the browser's built-in speech-recognition API (the same one Chrome and Edge use for dictation). Quality is best for clearly spoken English; other languages and noisy audio degrade in the usual ways for this category of speech-recognition.
• Audio Trimmer — visual waveform editor for cutting and trimming audio files.
• Audio Converter — convert between MP3, WAV, OGG, AAC and FLAC.
• Noise Generator — generate white, brown and pink noise plus ambient backgrounds for sleep, focus and tinnitus relief.
• Screen Recorder — record your screen (and optionally system audio and mic) directly in the browser via the standard getDisplayMedia() API. The recording stays in the browser until you explicitly download it.
• Speech to Text — live dictation from your microphone, again via the browser's speech API.
• GIF Maker — assemble a GIF from a video clip or a sequence of images, with frame-rate and looping options.

When the in-browser approach won't be the best fit

Video work is computationally heavy, and a smartphone or low-spec laptop will be dramatically slower than a cloud GPU. As rough guidance: clips up to 5–10 minutes at 1080p tend to be comfortable on a modern laptop; full-length 4K videos, multi-hour recordings, or batch processing of many files will hurt. For those cases, a desktop install of native FFmpeg (free, command-line, available on every operating system) or a paid editor like DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut Pro will be more practical. The tools here are tuned for the everyday "I need to trim 30 seconds out of this clip and re-share it" workflow that doesn't justify firing up a full editor.

Browser support and known limits

FFmpeg WASM relies on SharedArrayBuffer and the cross-origin isolation headers (COOP / COEP) that go with it. Chrome, Firefox, Safari (16.4+) and Edge all support this; older browsers and some embedded WebViews may not. iOS Safari has historically been the most fragile because Apple imposes tighter memory limits on the WebKit-based Safari process — very large files may simply fail to load on a phone. The screen recorder uses navigator.mediaDevices.getDisplayMedia(), which is available in every modern desktop browser but limited or absent on mobile. Where a particular tool can't run on your device, the page will say so up front rather than failing silently mid-job.