Rotate a video, without losing quality

Two ways to turn a video

Video files can store a rotation that players apply when they show the picture; FFmpeg's documentation describes it as the amount the video should be turned before it is displayed, kept as metadata (FFmpeg). The fast way changes only that setting and copies the video untouched. The other way draws every frame turned and encodes them again (Mediabunny).

In our tests on a laptop in Chrome and Edge, a ten-second video was turned the fast way in under a tenth of a second, with every video packet identical to the original, and twenty seconds of 1080p were re-encoded turned in 4 to 9 seconds.

Why videos end up sideways

A phone records with its camera fixed in its body and notes which way it was held, so players can turn the picture. When the phone lay flat on a table, or turned just as recording started, that note can be wrong, and the video plays on its side even though the picture itself is fine. Fixing it the fast way just corrects the written-down turn.

Sometimes the opposite happens: the turn is right, but an app or a website ignores it and shows the video on its side. Then the fast way cannot help, because the setting was never the problem. Choose Re-encode the frames, which bakes the turn into the pictures so nothing has to read a setting.

Before you share it on WhatsApp or post it on Instagram

Most turned videos are headed for a chat or a feed, and there you cannot check how the app reads the file until after you send it. If you want to be sure the video stands the right way in any app, pick Re-encode the frames before you save: the turn is then part of every picture, so there is no setting left for an app to read or ignore. The fast way is the better choice when you keep the video for yourself or edit it further, because nothing is lost.

Turning a video does not change its framing. A landscape video turned 90 degrees becomes tall, but everything in it lies on its side, so turning is the fix for a sideways video, not a way to make a wide clip fit a vertical post. For that, horizontal to vertical video fits the whole picture into a tall frame, and WhatsApp status video also splits a long one into 90-second parts for a status.

Mirror a video

Left to right flips the picture like a mirror, which undoes the mirrored look of some front camera recordings and makes writing readable again. Upside down flips it top to bottom. This tool always draws a mirror into the pictures rather than relying on a setting, so the video shows mirrored in every player; that means a mirrored video is always re-encoded, and the panel says so.

Which way is right

90° right turns the picture clockwise, 90° left counterclockwise, and 180° turns it upside down. If you are unsure, watch the small preview under the settings: it shows the frame in the player turned and mirrored exactly as the new file will be. Pause the video on a frame with a face or a horizon to see it clearly.

Large and long videos

The fast way copies the video without decoding it, so length hardly matters. Turning a 253 MB, ten-minute 720p video took about 0.6 seconds in Chrome and Edge, with every video and sound packet carried over unchanged. Re-encoding the frames takes real time instead: a quarter to a half of the video's length for 1080p on our laptop.

On a computer, Chrome and Edge write a turned MP4 bigger than 500 MB straight into a file you choose. Phones hold the result in memory until the download, so a phone is best kept to videos of about 200 MB.

On an iPhone, Android or Windows

The Photos app on iPhone can rotate and flip videos as well as photos (Apple). This page is for a video that is already on a computer or an Android phone, a WebM or MKV the Photos app will not take, or a turn that must also show in apps that ignore the rotation setting.

On Android, open it in Chrome or Samsung Internet; on a Windows PC, in Chrome or Edge. The fast way works even where the browser cannot play the video, such as an iPhone HEVC video in Edge on our Windows test laptop, because nothing is decoded.

What you get

The result is always an MP4. H.264 and HEVC pictures turned the fast way stay in their codec; everything that is re-encoded becomes H.264, and VP8, VP9 or AV1 videos are always re-encoded into H.264. AAC sound is copied; other sound becomes AAC where the browser can make it, and is otherwise copied as it is when an MP4 can hold it. Like every file made here, the MP4 has no location, recording date or phone model in it.