How do I permanently rotate a sideways video for free?

Choose a video, pick 90° right, 180° or 90° left, and press Rotate video. The pixels themselves are re-oriented and re-encoded as a standard MP4, so the clip plays upright in every player rather than relying on a metadata flag. Nothing is uploaded.

Why do phone videos open sideways on a computer?

Phones often record with the sensor in a fixed orientation and simply add a rotation tag saying how to display it. Well-behaved players obey the tag; plenty of desktop players, smart TVs, editors and upload pipelines ignore it, so the same file looks fine on the phone and sideways elsewhere.

What rotation options are there?

Three: 90° right (clockwise), 180°, and 90° left (counter-clockwise). 90° right is selected by default. There is no arbitrary angle and no automatic orientation detection — you choose the direction, which avoids a tool guessing wrongly and making things worse.

What is the difference between this and rotating a PDF?

A PDF stores rotation as a page attribute, so our PDF rotate tool changes one number and leaves the content untouched. Video containers have a rotation tag too, but it is widely ignored, so this tool re-renders the actual pixels instead. That is slower and costs one generation of quality, and it is the reason the fix actually sticks.

Will rotating reduce quality?

Slightly, because the frames are re-encoded rather than copied. Output is H.264 at CRF 20 with AAC audio at 128 kbps, which is a high-quality setting — visually very hard to distinguish from the original on normal viewing, but technically a second generation of compression.

My video rotated further than I expected. Why?

Because a rotation tag on the source is applied first when the file is decoded, and your chosen rotation is then added on top. A clip already tagged 90° that looks sideways in your player may already be upright to the decoder, so adding 90° overshoots. If that happens, run it again with the opposite direction or 180°.

How long does it take, and are there limits?

Roughly real time, since encoding runs on a single CPU thread with no GPU acceleration. Files up to 500MB are accepted and anything larger is refused with a clear message. The engine is about 31MB, downloaded on first use and cached by the browser afterwards.

What formats are supported?

MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI and MKV go in, and a standard MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio comes out — the combination that plays on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, smart TVs and every social platform without complaint. Output dimensions are rounded to even numbers as H.264 requires.

Rotate Video

Rotate video files 90°, 180° or 270° online free — fix upside-down or sideways recordings. No upload required — instant, private, in-browser.

Files never leave your deviceInstant — no upload waitFree, no sign-up

Choose a video or drag & drop it hereMP4, MOV, WebM… rotated and re-encoded on your device, never uploaded

or import from

Rotate a video 90° left, 90° right or 180° and have it stay rotated. The pixels are re-oriented and re-encoded rather than relying on a metadata flag that half the world's players ignore. Runs in your browser with FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly — no upload, no sign-up, no watermark, up to 500MB.

Why sideways videos happen at all

It is rarely a broken file. Phones and cameras commonly record with the sensor in one fixed orientation and attach a rotation tag describing how the picture should be displayed. Your phone's gallery reads that tag and shows the clip upright, which is why the problem is invisible until the file travels.

Then it lands somewhere that ignores the tag — an older desktop player, a smart TV, a video editor's import, a social upload pipeline, a PowerPoint embed — and plays sideways. The metadata was always advisory, and plenty of software simply does not honour it. Re-encoding the pixels removes the ambiguity: there is nothing left to interpret.

Pixels versus metadata, and why this tool picks pixels

Two ways to rotate a video, and what each is good for.
	Re-encoding the pixels (this tool)	Changing the rotation tag
Plays upright everywhere	Yes	Only where the tag is honoured
Speed	Roughly real time	Near instant
Quality cost	One generation (CRF 20)	None
File size	Changes with the re-encode	Unchanged
Survives editing and re-upload	Yes	Often stripped
Works in old players and TVs	Yes	Frequently not

Worth contrasting with rotating a PDF, where the opposite choice is correct: PDF readers reliably honour the page rotation attribute, so changing one number is both instant and lossless. Video tags do not enjoy that reliability, which is why the slower approach is the right one here.

How to use it

Choose a video — MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI or MKV, up to 500MB.
Pick a direction: 90° right for a clip lying on its left side, 90° left for the other, 180° for upside down.
Press Rotate video and keep the tab in the foreground; background tabs get throttled.
Check the inline preview before downloading — before and after file sizes are shown alongside it.

There is deliberately no automatic orientation detection. A tool guessing at what "upright" means gets it wrong on tripod shots, overhead footage and anything filmed at an angle, and a wrong guess costs you a full re-encode to undo.

If the result overshoots

One quirk to know about. When a source file carries its own rotation tag, that rotation isapplied first as the file is decoded, and your chosen angle is added on top. So a clip that looks sideways in your player may already be upright by the time the filter sees it, and adding 90° turns it too far.

There is no need to reason it through: if the preview comes out wrong, run the original again with the opposite direction, or with 180°. Between the three options one of them is always right, and the preview tells you which before you download anything.

What you give up by keeping it local

Your footage never leaves the device, which matters for family video, unreleased content and client work. The cost is that encoding happens on one CPU thread with no GPU acceleration — the single-threaded WebAssembly build is required because the site does not set the cross-origin isolation headers the multi-threaded one needs. Expect roughly real-time speed, and a~31MB engine download the first time, cached thereafter.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I permanently rotate a sideways video for free?
Choose a video, pick 90° right, 180° or 90° left, and press Rotate video. The pixels themselves are re-oriented and re-encoded as a standard MP4, so the clip plays upright in every player rather than relying on a metadata flag. Nothing is uploaded.
Why do phone videos open sideways on a computer?
Phones often record with the sensor in a fixed orientation and simply add a rotation tag saying how to display it. Well-behaved players obey the tag; plenty of desktop players, smart TVs, editors and upload pipelines ignore it, so the same file looks fine on the phone and sideways elsewhere.
What rotation options are there?
Three: 90° right (clockwise), 180°, and 90° left (counter-clockwise). 90° right is selected by default. There is no arbitrary angle and no automatic orientation detection — you choose the direction, which avoids a tool guessing wrongly and making things worse.
What is the difference between this and rotating a PDF?
A PDF stores rotation as a page attribute, so our PDF rotate tool changes one number and leaves the content untouched. Video containers have a rotation tag too, but it is widely ignored, so this tool re-renders the actual pixels instead. That is slower and costs one generation of quality, and it is the reason the fix actually sticks.
Will rotating reduce quality?
Slightly, because the frames are re-encoded rather than copied. Output is H.264 at CRF 20 with AAC audio at 128 kbps, which is a high-quality setting — visually very hard to distinguish from the original on normal viewing, but technically a second generation of compression.
My video rotated further than I expected. Why?
Because a rotation tag on the source is applied first when the file is decoded, and your chosen rotation is then added on top. A clip already tagged 90° that looks sideways in your player may already be upright to the decoder, so adding 90° overshoots. If that happens, run it again with the opposite direction or 180°.
How long does it take, and are there limits?
Roughly real time, since encoding runs on a single CPU thread with no GPU acceleration. Files up to 500MB are accepted and anything larger is refused with a clear message. The engine is about 31MB, downloaded on first use and cached by the browser afterwards.
What formats are supported?
MP4, MOV, WebM, AVI and MKV go in, and a standard MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio comes out — the combination that plays on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, smart TVs and every social platform without complaint. Output dimensions are rounded to even numbers as H.264 requires.