Rotate and Flip Video
Turn a video 90, 180 or 270 degrees and mirror it, starting from the orientation it already has.
- Free
- No sign-up
- No watermark
- Runs in your browser
Loading the tool.
Which way should you turn it?
Most clips that play sideways were never recorded sideways. A phone films through a sensor fixed in the body and writes down how it was held, so the picture is stored one way round and tagged to be shown another. Players honour the tag, several upload forms and older editors ignore it, and the same file then looks right in one place and wrong in the next. That is why this page starts by telling you which way your file already plays, and why two of the settings below change nothing on screen at all.
| Setting | What happens to the picture | A 1920 × 1080 clip becomes | Frames repainted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turn right 90° | The top edge swings to the right, so a clip lying on its left side stands up | 1080 × 1920 | No, when the orientation can travel as a tag |
| Turn left 90° | The top edge swings to the left: the same move the other way round | 1080 × 1920 | No, when the orientation can travel as a tag |
| Turn 180° | An upside-down recording comes back up; both sides keep their length | 1920 × 1080 | No, when the orientation can travel as a tag |
| Mirror left to right | Left and right swap, so a face changes side and any writing in the shot reads backwards | 1920 × 1080 | Yes, always |
| Flip top to bottom | Top and bottom swap, which is a 180° turn and a mirror together, not a turn on its own | 1920 × 1080 | Yes, always |
| Paint the file's own tag in | Nothing moves on screen: the turn your file asks players for is drawn into the pixels instead | Whatever size it already plays at | Yes, always |
A quarter turn swaps the two numbers and changes nothing else: 1920 × 1080 comes out 1080 × 1920, and 1080 × 1920 comes out 1920 × 1080. Half a turn leaves both alone. The sizes above are the frame a player shows, which for a tagged file is already the turned one, so a portrait phone clip reading 1080 × 1920 here is stored 1920 × 1080 underneath. Orientation itself rides in the MP4 and MOV track header as a small transformation matrix, and writing a new one is a change of a few bytes rather than a pass over every frame — but only a rotation fits in there. There is no mirrored flag, so mirroring, flipping and painting a tag into the picture all mean decoding, redrawing and re-encoding each frame, at the speed of your own device.
How it works
Drop the clip in. Choose an MP4, MOV, WebM or MKV, or drag it onto the box. The tool reads the headers, prints the size it plays at and whether the file carries a rotation tag, and pulls one frame out to work against. Nothing is sent anywhere to do it.
Turn it, then mirror it if you need to. Pick a quarter turn and watch the frame follow. Mirror left to right and flip top to bottom are separate switches, and they apply to the picture after the turn, so what you see in the preview is the order the export uses. The new width and height are printed as you change things.
Export and check the size. Press the button and follow the bar; cancelling leaves your settings where they are. The finished MP4 plays on this page, with its frame size and whether the video was copied or re-encoded printed beside it, before you save anything.
What you get
- The starting orientation is read, not assumed
- Before you choose anything, the page says how your file plays and how it is stored underneath. A tool that assumes every video starts upright makes you correct a phone clip that was already correct, and you find out after the export instead of before it. Here the turn you pick is added to the tag your file carries, exactly as a player would add it.
- A quarter turn can cost nothing
- Orientation lives in the container, not in the picture, so a turn on its own can often be written as a new tag while the encoded frames are copied across untouched: no second round of compression, and a wait measured by how fast the file reads rather than by how many frames it holds. When a file cannot be copied, the result says so instead of leaving you to guess.
- Mirroring is real, not a flag
- Every frame is decoded, drawn mirrored and encoded again, so the picture that comes out is mirrored everywhere it is opened. A flag would have been cheaper and would have worked in about half the apps you might send the file to, which is a worse outcome than a slower export.
- The new frame size before you export
- A right or left quarter turn swaps width and height, and that is the single thing most likely to break an upload: a feed that wanted 1080 × 1920 gets 1920 × 1080 and letterboxes it. The number under the settings is the frame you will actually get, and it changes the moment you pick a different turn.
Questions people ask
How do I rotate a video 90 degrees?
Drop the file on the box, choose Turn right 90° or Turn left 90°, then press the export button. Right takes the top edge to the right-hand side, which stands up a clip that was lying on its left; left does the opposite. The preview shows the result on a frame from your own video, so you can tell the two apart without exporting both.
How do I flip or mirror a video?
Switch on Mirror left to right for the selfie-camera look, where left and right swap and lettering in the shot reads backwards. Flip top to bottom is the other axis, and the two together come to the same picture as a 180° turn. Mirrors apply after the turn, so the switch always means the left and right of the picture you are looking at in the preview.
Does rotating a video lose quality?
Not when the orientation can be written into the container: the video frames are copied byte for byte and only the tag changes, so the picture is the original one. That needs a source whose codec fits an MP4 and whose video does not begin before 0:00, which some exported files do. Mirroring, flipping and painting an existing tag into the pixels always re-encode, once, at a high quality setting. The result tells you which of the two you got.
Why does my video play sideways in some apps but not others?
Because the picture and the instruction to turn it are stored separately. Your phone kept the frames the way the sensor read them and added a rotation tag; a player that reads the tag shows the clip upright, and an upload form or an older editor that ignores it shows the same file on its side. If that is your problem, do not turn the video at all: choose the setting that paints the file's own tag into the pixels, and the frames themselves come out the right way up.
Does rotating change the video's width and height?
A quarter turn does: the two numbers swap, so 1920 × 1080 becomes 1080 × 1920 and the other way round. A 180° turn and either mirror leave the frame exactly as it was. This matters because the vertical feeds decide what is full screen from those numbers alone, so a landscape recording turned on its side is 1080 × 1920 and treated as vertical, whatever is actually in the frame.
Can I rotate a video on my iPhone or Android phone?
Yes. The turn happens inside the phone's browser, so that browser needs WebCodecs: a current Chrome on Android, or Safari 16.4 and later on an iPhone. The one thing older Safari cannot do is re-encode a soundtrack, which this tool only has to do when the sound is not already AAC — the Opus inside a WebM or an MKV — so a clip from the camera roll is fine and a WebM wants Safari 26. Open the page, tap the box, pick the clip from your camera roll and save what comes out. A turn written as a tag asks almost nothing of the device; a mirror re-encodes every frame, so on a phone keep the page in front until it finishes, because browsers slow down work in tabs you have left.
Is my file uploaded to rotate it?
No. The video is read from your disk by this tab, turned inside it and written back out in the same tab. There is no upload step, no queue and no copy of your recording on our side to delete afterwards, which is also why there is no account to make and no watermark on what you download.
Upright, but still the wrong shape
Turning a frame moves all of it at once. Making a landscape recording work in a vertical feed is a different job: GPT-Video follows the speaker's face through the clip and moves a 9:16 window with it, then captions what comes out. That runs on our servers as part of the paid product.
Related
Your file is processed on your device and never uploaded.