Rotate Video 90° or 180°, or Flip It

How to rotate a video

1. Choose the video above: MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM or MKV. The preview shows it the way your browser plays it.
2. Pick "90° right" (clockwise), "180°" or "90° left" (anticlockwise). Pick "No rotation" if you only want to mirror it.
3. Tick "Mirror (flip left–right)" if text or the scene appears reversed.
4. Leave "Re-encode" unticked for the fast, lossless route. Tick it only if the result shows the wrong way in a particular player.
5. Press "Rotate video" and download the file. The result card says whether the video was copied or re-encoded.

Two ways to rotate: the flag or the pixels

Phones usually store the picture the way the sensor captured it and add an orientation flag, a small piece of rotation metadata that tells the player how to turn it on screen. That gives two ways to rotate a video:

Flag only (the default)

the rotation value in the file is changed and the picture and sound are copied as they are. It takes seconds even for a long file and the quality is identical.

Re-encode

every frame is decoded, turned and encoded again into an MP4. It is slower and costs a little quality, but the pixels themselves are now the right way up, so every player shows it correctly.

Phones, current browsers and mainstream players read the flag. Some older TVs, media boxes, editors and upload forms look only at the pixels, which is the one reason to re-encode.

The flag-only route has two practical advantages. It works in browsers that can't encode video, including many phone browsers, because nothing is encoded. And it works on files whose picture your browser can't decode, such as HEVC on some computers, because the picture is never decoded. MP4, MOV and M4V files come out as MP4; WebM stays WebM and MKV stays MKV. A re-encoded result is always MP4.

Which way to turn it

Look at the preview and find something that should point up, such as a head, a tree or a line of text:

• If the top of the scene points right, choose 90° left.
• If the top points left, choose 90° right.
• If the scene is upside down, choose 180°.

Rotating doesn't reframe anything: a landscape scene turned 90° becomes a tall picture lying on its side. To turn a wide video into a 9:16 clip for Shorts or Reels while keeping it upright, use the horizontal to vertical converter instead, or crop the video to the shape you need.

Flip or mirror a video

Mirror flips the picture left to right, as if seen in a mirror. Common reasons:

• Text reads backwards because a front-facing camera saved the clip mirrored.
• A dance or exercise tutorial, mirrored so viewers can copy the moves facing the screen.
• Footage recorded through a mirror or reflected off a teleprompter's glass.

There is no separate button for a vertical flip (top to bottom) because it is the same as 180° plus Mirror. A 180° turn makes the picture upside down and also swaps left and right; mirroring swaps left and right back, leaving only the top-to-bottom flip.

Like rotation, mirroring is done with the flag unless Re-encode is ticked. Mirror flags are less widely used than rotation flags, so check the mirrored file in the player you care about, and if it isn't mirrored there, run it again with Re-encode ticked.

Examples

Limits

• Turns are in steps of 90°. A slightly tilted horizon needs a video editor that can rotate by small angles and crop the corners.
• Re-encoding needs WebCodecs video encoding: a current Chrome or Edge, Safari 16.4 or later, or Firefox 130 or later on a computer. Its speed depends on the device and the length of the clip.
• The tool turns the whole video; it can't rotate one section and leave the rest.

Next steps

A rotated vertical clip is often headed for a feed with captions. The guide to adding subtitles to vertical video covers rotation metadata and placement in narrow frames, and the free subtitle editor renders the subtitles into a new MP4. If a phone video won't play at all rather than playing sideways, the cause is more likely the codec; the HEVC compatibility guide explains why.