Free · fixes the pixels, not just a flag
Rotate video online
Turn sideways phone footage the right way up, flip an upside-down recording, or mirror a selfie clip, permanently, in every player.
The rotation flag, and why it keeps betraying you
Your phone's camera sensor has a fixed orientation. Hold the phone upright and it still records a landscape image, then writes a note in the file's metadata saying "display this turned ninety degrees". Every mainstream player reads that note, which is why the video looks fine in your camera roll.
The trouble starts when a file crosses into software that ignores the flag: some editors, some upload pipelines, some older players. The note is advisory, and anything that skips it shows you the sideways frames that were really recorded. Rotating the pixels removes the ambiguity: there is no longer a discrepancy between what is stored and what should be shown.
What each rotation option does
There are five: 90° clockwise, 90° counter-clockwise, 180°, mirror horizontally and mirror vertically. Each one turns or flips the actual pixels and re-encodes the clip once as an H.264 MP4 at CRF 21, with 128 kbps AAC audio, so the result plays the same way in every player, including the ones that ignore rotation flags.
A 90° turn swaps width and height, so a 1920×1080 frame comes out 1080×1920; check that the destination expects a vertical video before you send it. The free version takes files up to 200 MB and adds a small corner mark; Pro removes both. If the clip is only sideways in one app, the rotation flag may be the real problem, and fixing a sideways video explains when changing the flag is enough.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does my phone video play sideways on one device but not another?
- Phones almost always record in landscape and attach a rotation flag to the file saying which way up it should be shown. Players that read the flag turn it for you; players and editors that ignore it show the raw sideways frames. This tool rotates the actual pixels, so the file is correct everywhere rather than correct only where the flag is honoured.
- Does rotating lose quality?
- A little, because the frames have to be re-encoded. There is no way to physically turn the picture without decoding and re-drawing it. The tool encodes at a high quality setting so the loss is not visible in normal viewing, but it is not a lossless operation the way a stream copy is.
- What is the difference between rotating 180° and mirroring?
- Rotating 180° turns the picture upside down, as though you spun the camera around its lens. Mirroring flips it across an axis, which produces the reflection you see in a mirror: text becomes backwards. Use rotation to fix an upside-down recording and mirroring to undo a selfie camera that flipped your footage.
- Is my video uploaded anywhere?
- No. VidClip runs FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly inside your browser. The file is read from your disk into the page's memory, processed there, and saved back to your disk. There is no upload, no server queue, and no copy of your footage anywhere but your machine.