Guides5 min read
Why Does a Reversed Video Have No Sound?
Reversed video has no sound? Usually the clip has no audio track at all, or ffmpeg cannot reverse its codec and silently drops audio to avoid failing.
Reverse video
Play a clip backwards — picture and sound together, in one click. Free, instant, and nothing leaves your device.
Drop a video here, or click to browse
MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, or AVI — up to 2GB
Short clips only — up to 60 seconds, or about 20 seconds at 1080p
A video reverser that tells you what it's doing
One button, no settings
Drop a clip, press Reverse video, get it back playing end-to-start. There is nothing to configure and nothing to get wrong.
Audio flipped with the picture
The soundtrack is reversed in the same pass, so it stays in sync with the backwards footage instead of drifting out of it.
Honest about what it can handle
Your clip's length and frame size are checked before the engine even loads, so an over-budget video is refused in a second rather than after a long run that ends in a crash.
Original timing kept intact
Frame rate and duration come out identical to the source — the order of the frames is the only thing that changes.
MP4 that plays anywhere
H.264 video and AAC audio in an MP4 with a front-loaded index, so it uploads straight to any social platform or drops into any editor.
Your footage stays on your device
Everything runs locally through ffmpeg.wasm. No upload, no account, no watermark, no copy of your clip left behind.
Backwards in three steps
- 1
Add a short clip
Drag a video onto the page or click to browse. MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and AVI all work. Keep it under 60 seconds — around 20 at 1080p — because reversing holds every frame in memory at once.
- 2
Press Reverse video
There is nothing to set. The picture is flipped end-to-end with ffmpeg's reverse filter and the audio with areverse, in the same pass.
- 3
Watch it back, then download
The reversed clip appears in a player right on the page so you can check it before saving it as MP4. The whole thing ran in your browser — the file was never uploaded.
What people reverse clips for
Backwards footage is a visual effect, a loop-building trick and an analysis tool all at once. Whichever one you're after, the clip is flipped in your browser in seconds.
Reverse-motion social clips
Spilled drinks pouring back into the glass, a jump that lands upwards, confetti gathering off the floor — the effect that made backwards clips a format in the first place.
Bounce and boomerang loops
Reverse a copy of a short clip, join it to the end of the original, and the result plays forwards then backwards forever with no visible cut.
Reading a fast action backwards
Coaches, magicians and lab technicians often spot the moment something went wrong more easily when the sequence unwinds from its result to its cause.
Assembly-style reveals
Film yourself taking something apart, then reverse it so it appears to build itself — far easier than staging the assembly on camera.
Frequently asked questions
Does the sound play backwards too?
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Yes. The picture goes through ffmpeg's reverse filter and the audio through areverse, both in a single pass, so speech and music come out backwards along with the footage. If the clip has no audio track at all — a screen recording, a drone shot, an already-muted export — the audio pass is skipped automatically and you still get a reversed video.
Why is there a 60-second limit on this video reverser?
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Reversing is the one video operation that cannot be streamed: the last frame of your clip is the first frame that has to be written, so ffmpeg decodes and buffers the entire clip before it can emit anything. Uncompressed, a single 1080p frame is about 3 MB, which is roughly 93 MB for every second of 30fps footage. The browser's WebAssembly heap tops out near 2 GB, so 1080p runs out at about 20 seconds. 60 seconds is the ceiling for smaller frames.
How long a clip can I reverse at 4K or 720p?
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The real budget is frames, not seconds, so it scales with resolution: roughly 45 seconds at 720p, 20 at 1080p and 5 at 4K. The page reads your clip's actual dimensions and length as soon as it loads and tells you straight away if it is over budget, rather than letting ffmpeg run for two minutes and then die.
Why does the progress bar show elapsed seconds instead of a percentage?
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Because for most of the run there is no honest percentage to show. Nothing is written until the decode-and-buffer phase finishes, so ffmpeg's own counter reports zero the whole time. Rather than freeze a fake 0%, the bar pulses and counts seconds, then switches to a real percentage the moment reversed frames start being written.
Is the reversed video re-encoded, and does that cost quality?
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It has to be. Every frame comes out in a new order, so there is no way to copy the original stream through untouched the way a container change or an audio strip can. The output is H.264 at CRF 23, a visually near-identical setting, so you lose one generation of compression rather than anything you would notice on a social clip.
Does reversing change the length or speed of my video?
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No. Frame timing is preserved exactly, so the reversed file has the same duration and the same frame rate as the original — this is not slow motion and not a boomerang on its own. To get a bounce loop, reverse a copy here and then join it onto the end of the original.
Can I reverse the video but keep the audio playing forwards?
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Not from this page, which is deliberately one button with no settings. The usual route is to reverse the clip here, strip the backwards audio with the remove-audio tool, and lay your own music or voiceover over it in an editor.
Does my clip get uploaded to a server?
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No. ffmpeg.wasm runs the whole reverse inside your browser tab, which is also why the memory limit above exists — the work happens on your machine, not on a rented server, so there is no upload wait, no queue and no copy of your footage anywhere.
Play your video backwards now
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