Rotate Video

Stand a sideways clip upright — a quarter turn, a half turn, and a mirror alongside it if the picture is reversed.

Secure server processingVideoWorkingNo account needed

What this tool does

Rotate Video hands your clip to FFmpeg on the processing service and turns the picture with its transpose filter. Three angles are offered: 90° clockwise, 180°, and 90° anticlockwise, the last of which the settings number 270°. The transpose filter itself has only the two quarter-turn directions, so the half turn is the clockwise one run twice. A quarter turn swaps the frame's dimensions, so a 1920×1080 recording comes back 1080×1920 and a landscape clip becomes a tall one; a half turn leaves the dimensions exactly as they were. The separate flip setting is applied after the rotation and mirrors the frame horizontally or vertically. That is a true mirror, not a re-orientation — any lettering, logo or number plate in shot reads backwards once it has been applied.

Whatever goes in, an MP4 comes out. There is no output format to choose on this tool: the result is always H.264 video with AAC audio in an MP4, with the index moved to the front so a player can start before the file has finished downloading, encoded at a fixed constant-rate-factor of 26 on x264's veryfast preset. Input is much broader than output — MP4, MOV, M4V, MKV, WebM, AVI, OGV, MPEG, WMV, FLV, TS, M2TS and 3GP are all read — so a WebM sent here returns as an MP4, and a file carrying no video track is refused with that message rather than quietly turned into something else.

One setting deserves a plain warning rather than a sales line. Only change the rotation flag when possible is ticked by default, and it describes a shortcut that genuinely exists in the format: MP4 keeps orientation in the video track's display matrix, so a sideways phone clip could in principle be stood upright by rewriting a single number with no frame recompressed. This service does not take that route. The rotation filter is assembled before the shortcut is tested, and the test only passes when no filter is present, so every job re-encodes the pixels whether the box is ticked or not. Plan on that: allow the processing time, and expect one generation of H.264 loss on top of whatever the camera already applied. Video Metadata reads the rotation flag a container is currently carrying, if you want to see what players are honouring before you commit to baking a turn in.

None of this runs in the tab, because no browser ships a video encoder worth using for it. The clip is uploaded over an encrypted connection to a machine running FFmpeg, and the upload, the finished MP4 and the job record are cleared together once the retention window closes — six hours by default. One video per job inside a 200 MB ceiling; add several and each is rotated on its own with the same settings. Anything longer than three hours is turned away before work starts, and each job has a ten-minute processing budget that a long, high-resolution source can genuinely exhaust.

How to use it

  1. Add the footage. One clip per job, up to 200 MB. Drop several in and each is rotated separately under the same settings. MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, FLV and MPEG are all accepted.
  2. Pick the angle. 90° clockwise for a clip lying on its left side, 90° anticlockwise for one lying on its right, 180° for footage that arrived the wrong way up.
  3. Add a mirror only if you need one. Also flip is set to No by default. Horizontal reverses a mirrored front-camera or conferencing recording; vertical is rarer and mostly belongs to periscope and reflected-rig footage.
  4. Leave the rotation-flag box alone. It is ticked by default and makes no difference to what comes back today, since the picture is re-encoded on either setting. It is not worth deliberating over.
  5. Run it and take the MP4. The original extension is dropped, so holiday.mov comes back as holiday-rotate.mp4. The result panel reports the size the clip arrived at and the size it left at.

Processing & privacy

Secure server processing. This operation requires temporary server processing.

Common use cases

Phone footage that arrives on its side

A handset held sideways stores landscape frames plus an orientation flag, and any player or editor that ignores that flag shows the clip lying down. Turning it here puts the correction in the pixels, where nothing downstream can disregard it.

A clip that came back the wrong way up

Action cameras, dashboard mounts and ceiling rigs are frequently installed inverted. A single 180° pass corrects the whole recording and leaves the frame dimensions untouched.

Footage that is both sideways and reversed

A camera shooting through a mirror or a gimbal that inverts the sensor can produce a frame needing a turn and a mirror at once. The angle and the flip are applied in that order in one pass, so one job settles both.

Preparing a portrait upload

Reels, Shorts and TikTok expect a tall frame. When a clip was shot sideways, standing it up here is the portrait fix that has to come before Crop Video trims it to 9:16.

Questions

Is my video uploaded?
Yes. FFmpeg does the work on the processing service, so the clip travels there over an encrypted connection, is rotated, and is deleted along with the MP4 it produced when the job's six-hour retention runs out.
Can I rotate by a small angle to straighten a tilted shot?
No. Only 90°, 180° and 270° are offered, because those are the turns the transpose filter performs by moving whole pixels, with no resampling and no lost corners. Levelling a horizon needs an arbitrary angle plus a crop to remove the empty triangles it creates, and that is not implemented here.
Can I flip a video without rotating it?
Not directly — the angle is a required choice with no leave-it-alone option, so a mirror always arrives with a turn attached. There is a clean way round it: choose 180° and flip vertically, and the two cancel into exactly a horizontal mirror, because a half turn is the horizontal and vertical mirrors combined. 180° with a horizontal flip gives you a vertical mirror the same way.
Why did my WebM come back as an MP4?
Because MP4 is the only container this tool writes. The rotation job has no format picker, so H.264 in MP4 is the result regardless of what went in. Convert Video is the tool that changes containers and can produce VP9 in WebM.
Does rotating cost quality?
Yes, more than the operation itself implies. The turn is exact, since transpose relocates whole pixels rather than interpolating them, but the frame is then re-encoded to H.264 at a fixed quality setting and the audio is re-encoded to AAC. Keep your original, and avoid passing the same clip through twice.
Can it work out which way up the clip should be?
No. There is no orientation detection at all — you choose the angle, and a wrong guess simply produces a wrong result that you re-run. Video Metadata will read the rotation already recorded in the container if you want a starting point.
Why am I asked to answer a small puzzle first?
A transcode holds a processor core for as long as the job runs, so signed-out requests to the video tools are gated behind one short puzzle before the queue accepts them — a sum, the next number in a sequence, a few numbers to put in order, or a plain word question. Signing in as an active account removes the step.

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