Video is the category where free web tools are at their worst: an upload queue, a watermark, a five-minute cap, and a page covered in advertising for the privilege. The reason is simple — transcoding video on a server costs real money, so it has to be paid for somehow. These tools do not use a server. They run on the hardware video decoders and encoders already inside your browser, through WebCodecs, so there is nothing to queue, nothing to meter, and nothing to stamp. Deliberately narrow: cutting, muting, extracting, and converting are the jobs a browser is genuinely good at, and a general-purpose transcoder is the one it is not.
- 01
Cut a clip out of a recording
Drop the file, drag the two handles across the waveform, and snap them to the nearest silence so the cut does not land mid-word. Where the format allows it, the compressed audio is copied rather than decoded and re-encoded — so the piece you keep is bit-identical to the original, which no upload-based cutter offers.
- 02
Pull the audio out of a video
A recorded talk, an interview, a voice note buried in a phone clip. The audio track is usually already in a form you can keep as-is, so extracting it is a copy rather than a conversion — which is both instant and lossless.
- 03
Trim a clip before sending it
Most of what makes a video too big to send is the part nobody watches. Trimming the front and back is the cheapest possible edit and, done on keyframe boundaries, costs no quality at all.
- 04
Work with footage you have not released
Unreleased footage, a client's rushes, a recording of a private call. These are exactly the files that should not be handed to a free web service, and they are exactly what people put through one because the alternative is installing something. A tool that makes no request with the file removes the choice.
WebCodecs, not a 25 MB WebAssembly download
The obvious way to do video in a browser is a WebAssembly build of ffmpeg, and it is roughly 25 megabytes before it can do anything — then it transcodes in software, which on a phone is slow enough that the page reads as broken. These tools use the browser's own hardware codecs instead, so the work starts immediately and runs at the speed the device can actually manage.
Deliberately narrow
There is no general transcoder here, because a browser cannot be a good one. Cutting, muting, extracting, and format conversion between the codecs the browser already has are the jobs where it beats a server outright — no upload, no wait, no limit. Anything that needs a full software encode belongs in a desktop application, and saying so is more useful than a tool that hangs.
Copy rather than re-encode wherever possible
Trimming does not require re-encoding: the compressed frames inside the selection can be written into a new container untouched. Every tool here does that when the format allows it, reads the result back to confirm it happened, and says plainly when it could not.
The browser floor is stated, not discovered
WebCodecs reached Chrome and Edge at version 94, Firefox 130 on desktop, and Safari 26. Below that these tools cannot work at all, and they say so on the page rather than producing nothing. Codec support varies too — no browser can encode MP3, for instance — and each tool reports what it found rather than failing vaguely.
No upload means no limit
The size caps, task counters, and watermarks on free video sites all exist to bound someone's server bill. There is no server here, so there is no cap: the practical limit is your own machine's memory and patience.
Can you edit video in a browser without uploading it?
Yes. Modern browsers expose their hardware video decoders and encoders through the WebCodecs API, so a page can read, cut, and re-write media files locally. Tinapps video and audio tools work this way — the file is read from disk by the page and never sent anywhere, which also means they keep working with the network disconnected.
Why don't these tools use ffmpeg.wasm?
Because it is about 25 megabytes to download before anything can happen, and it transcodes in software rather than on the machine's video hardware — which on a phone is slow enough that the page appears to have frozen. WebCodecs uses the decoders the browser already contains, so the work starts immediately, at the cost of a narrower set of operations.
Which browsers support WebCodecs?
Chrome and Edge from version 94, Firefox 130 on desktop, Opera 80, Samsung Internet 17, and Safari 26 on macOS, iOS and iPadOS — Safari's earlier support was video-only and gained audio in that release. Below those versions the tools cannot work at all and say so rather than producing an empty file.
Is there a file size limit for editing video in the browser?
Not one imposed by Tinapps: there is no upload, so there is no bandwidth or storage to meter. The real limit is the memory your browser tab can allocate, which on a desktop machine comfortably handles files of several gigabytes and on a phone is considerably lower.
Does trimming a video or audio file reduce its quality?
It does not have to. The compressed frames inside the selection can be copied into a new container without being decoded, which makes the trimmed file bit-identical to that span of the original. Tinapps video and audio tools do this wherever the output format can carry the input's codec, and report which happened rather than leaving you to guess.
Can a browser convert a video to MP3?
It can extract the audio, but not into MP3: browsers ship an MP3 decoder and essentially never an MP3 encoder, so WebCodecs refuses that configuration. Cutting an existing MP3 works fine, because the frames are copied rather than encoded. For extracting audio out of a video, M4A, OGG, and WAV all work and the tools say so instead of failing quietly.