How do I remove one audio stream from an AVI file

audiovideovideo editing

I have several AVI files that have dual audio in Russian/English. The default audio is Russian, and I want to change the default language or remove the Russian language from these AVI files.

How could I achieve this? I don't want to change the audio stream every time I play the movie.

Are there any free tools?

Best Answer

I was able to do this with the Avidemux (GUI) program

Main menu: Audio -> Select track; you select the tracks you want to keep, and save as a new file.

Just in case, Avidemux is in the standard Fedora Linux repository; I'm sure it is standard in Ubuntu/Debian, too.

ffmpeg (console) is also able to do this:

$ ffmpeg -i file.avi -map 0:0 -map 0:3 -acodec copy -vcodec copy file.1-track.avi

(keeping the video track, and audio track #3), but on one of my files the resul I got with Avidemux was better.

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XVID Audio Removal – How to Remove Audio Stream from XVID Files

Frankly, I think you'll prefer using the ffmpeg solution. But I figured mencoder (mplayer's encoder) could do this too ... and it can, but only as a side-effect -- since it's built on top of a player, it can only process one audio stream at a time. If you were reversing the process (adding a second audio stream to a file that only had one), you'd need a different tool.

The -aid X option selects the audio stream (replace X with the stream's ID number). It looks like the mplayer output you've quoted shows the proper ID numbers already, so try with those. This keeps the first audio stream (use -aid 2 if you want the second):

$ mencoder orig.avi -o new.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -aid 1

Other commandline AVI tools that might help are:

avidemux (you can script with -nogui)
transcode

Change default audio track in .avi without remuxing

I used AVIdemux. It does it in seconds so it's not fully 'demuxing', only changing the preferred audio track (or simply deleting the one you don't want) and making the internal parts of the AVI container file mesh properly. It's a free program - http://sourceforge.net/projects/avidemux/?source=dlp

note: The program obviously has demuxing capabilities.

Best Answer

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XVID Audio Removal – How to Remove Audio Stream from XVID Files

Change default audio track in .avi without remuxing

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