Rotate or flip a video
Fix a clip that came off the phone sideways, or mirror a selfie recording.
Your file
Drop a file here, or click to choose
It stays on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Settings
Two kinds of sideways
Phones usually record in one orientation and add a rotation flag to the file. Good players read the flag; plenty of editors and websites ignore it, which is when a video suddenly appears sideways. This tool rotates the actual pixels and clears the flag, so the result looks the same everywhere.
Mirroring is separate from rotating. A front camera recording is mirrored, which is why text in the background reads backwards, pick "mirror horizontally" to fix that.
Why this one re-encodes
Rotating a still image can often be done losslessly, because JPEG blocks can be shuffled without decoding them. Video has no equivalent trick once you want the pixels themselves turned, so the frames are decoded, passed through transpose, and encoded again. That is what the quality slider is for. At the default 23 the loss is not visible; if the clip is going to be edited further afterwards, drop it to 18 so the next encode is not building on softened frames.
The alternative, rewriting the rotation flag and leaving the pixels alone, is fast and free but reintroduces exactly the problem you came here to solve: the flag is what half the software in the world ignores. Baking the orientation in is the point.
Working out which way to turn it
Getting this right first time is easier than guessing twice. Grab a still with grab a frame, look at which edge of the picture is currently the top, and turn that towards where you want it. A clip that reads bottom-to-top on your screen needs 90° clockwise. One that reads top-to-bottom needs counter-clockwise. Upside down needs 180°, which is the one case where mirroring will not also be required.
Rotation and flip are applied together, and the order is rotate first. If a selfie video is both sideways and mirrored, set both controls in one pass rather than running the tool twice, which would cost a second re-encode for nothing.
Portrait and landscape
A 90° turn swaps the dimensions: 1920 by 1080 becomes 1080 by 1920. That is genuinely what you want for a phone clip destined for a vertical platform, and genuinely not what you want if the video is going into a landscape timeline, where it will now be a tall strip with bars either side. If the target is a fixed shape, follow this with crop or resize, or use make a short, which handles the reframing as one step.
Common questions
My video looks fine here but sideways after upload. Why?
The file has a rotation flag your player respects and the site does not. Rotate it here, which bakes the correct orientation into the pixels.
Can I rotate by an arbitrary angle?
Not in this tool. 90, 180 and 270 degrees are lossless in orientation terms; anything else needs padding and crops the corners.