90° / 180° / 270°
How to rotate a video that came out sideways
Phones record orientation as a tag rather than in the picture itself, and some players ignore the tag entirely. This bakes the correct rotation into the video so it looks right everywhere.
Processed on your own hardware · never transmitted, never stored
What happens when you drop a file in
The file stays put. Your browser opens it the same way an image viewer would. There is no transfer, which is why there is no upload bar to watch.
An encoder arrives once. The first job on this site pulls down a compiled build of FFmpeg, roughly 30 MB. It is kept afterwards, so every job after the first starts immediately.
Your own hardware does the job. The work happens in this tab, on your processor. A laptop from the last few years handles short clips in well under real time.
The result lands in Downloads. Assembled in memory and handed straight to your browser. Close the tab and every trace of it is gone.
Why sideways video happens at all
A phone does not physically rotate the sensor when you turn it. It records the frames in one fixed orientation and writes a small rotation flag into the file's metadata, expecting the player to apply it.
Most modern players do. Older ones, some editors, Windows Media Player and a number of upload pipelines ignore the flag completely — which is when your perfectly normal video suddenly appears on its side.
The fix is to apply the rotation to the actual pixels, so no player has to be trusted to read metadata correctly.
This one re-encodes
Because the pixels themselves are being moved, the video has to be decoded and compressed again. Expect real processing time proportional to the clip length. The quality setting is fixed at a level where the loss is not visible.
If the picture is reversed rather than sideways, you want flip video.
Common questions
Why does my video look fine here but sideways elsewhere?
Your browser is reading the rotation metadata; the other player is not. Running it through this tool removes the ambiguity.
Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle?
No. Only 90-degree steps, which is what fixes the orientation problem.
Does audio survive?
Yes, the audio track is re-encoded alongside and stays in sync.
Do my files get uploaded?
No, everything happens in this tab.