Rotate a video

Choose a quarter turn and get the video back the right way up, usually in under a second. Nothing is re-encoded: the angle is written into the file as an instruction, so every frame arrives exactly as it left the camera.

    • Where it runs

      A video is read in the browser. Nothing is uploaded.

    • No queue, no account

      It starts the moment you drop the file, and it never asks who you are.

    • No watermark

      What comes out is the file you made, with nothing added to it.

    How it works

    1. Drop a video onto the box above, or press it to choose one.
    2. Pick a quarter turn: 90, 180 or 270 degrees clockwise.
    3. Press Rotate. It finishes in about the time it takes to read the file.
    4. Download the result.

    A rotation is one number, not a redrawn video

    MP4 and MOV both carry a transformation matrix beside the picture, and every player reads it before it draws a frame. Rotating a video properly means changing that number. The pixels are copied through untouched, which is why this takes milliseconds on a file that would take minutes to re-encode, and why the result is bit-for-bit as good as the original.

    That is also why the file that comes out is the same size as the one that went in. Nothing was compressed again, so there is nothing to shrink and nothing to lose.

    Why your video was sideways to begin with

    A phone films in one orientation and records the angle it was held at. Software that reads the flag shows the video upright; software that ignores it shows the raw frames, which is the sideways version. That is why the same file looks correct in the phone gallery and wrong in a video editor or on a website.

    So a video is rarely "filmed wrong". It is usually filmed with a flag that something downstream did not read — and setting the flag explicitly, which is what this does, is what makes it agree everywhere.

    When you need the rotation baked in instead

    A few places still ignore the flag: some older upload processors, some social platforms that re-encode on receipt, and some embedded players. If a video looks right here and wrong after uploading it somewhere, that is what happened.

    The fix in that case is a re-encode with the rotation applied to the pixels — slower, and one generation of quality. It is not offered here, because doing it by default would make everyone pay for a problem most people do not have.

    Rotate a video: common questions

    Does rotating lose quality?

    No. The angle is stored as an instruction in the container and the frames are copied through without being decoded, so the result is identical to the original. That is why it finishes in about a second and why the file size does not change.

    Is my video uploaded?

    No. The rotation happens in your browser and the file never leaves your device. You can disconnect from the internet before you press the button and it will still work, which is the shortest way to check a claim like this one.

    Can I rotate by an angle that is not a quarter turn?

    No. A quarter turn is a relabelling of rows and columns and costs nothing; any other angle means resampling every pixel, which is a re-encode and leaves diagonal edges softer than they were. It is a different operation with a different price.

    The video still looks sideways after uploading it somewhere. Why?

    Because that site is ignoring the rotation flag, usually while re-encoding your upload. It is a known gap in a few upload processors and older players. In that case you need the rotation baked into the pixels, which is a re-encode rather than what this page does.

    Is there a limit on the file?

    Only your own memory. Because nothing is decoded, this is one of the cheapest things you can do to a video — a file too large to convert will usually still rotate.

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