Bake Video Rotation Metadata

Fix sideways videos by baking the rotate flag into pixels

Some phones save video sideways and add a hidden rotation metadata flag that tells players how to display it. Most modern players obey the flag; some editing apps, upload pipelines, previews, and older players ignore it, so the clip looks sideways. This tool re-encodes the video so ffmpeg applies the embedded orientation while decoding, then writes normal upright pixels and clears the rotate flag.

Worked example: load a portrait phone clip that looks correct in your phone's player but sideways after upload. Run the tool once. The result is an H.264 video whose pixels are actually upright, so players no longer need to understand the original rotate/display-matrix metadata.

What changes

• The video stream is re-encoded to H.264 (CRF 23, preset medium) because the orientation has to become real pixels, not just metadata.
• The rotate tag is cleared (rotate=0) so players do not double-rotate the baked result.
• Audio is copied when the output container supports it; otherwise it is encoded to AAC in an MP4 output.

Notes and limits

• If your video has no rotate metadata, the output will look the same, just normalized through the same H.264 encode path.
• This differs from an explicit rotate tool: you do not choose 90/180/270 degrees here. The embedded rotation metadata in the file is the source of truth.
• Input and output are each capped at 25 MB because ffmpeg runs in the browser.

FAQ