Rotate Video Online — Turn 90°, 180° or 270° and Flip

Rotate a video by 90, 180 or 270 degrees and mirror it horizontally or vertically, re-encoded at full resolution.

Phones record sideways, action cameras mount upside down, and front-facing captures come out mirrored. This turns a clip in ninety-degree steps and flips it along either axis, writing a new file whose picture is genuinely oriented the way you asked rather than one carrying a hint that players may or may not honour.

How to rotate or flip a video

  1. Drop an MP4, MOV or M4V clip onto the upload zone, or click it to pick a file from your device.
  2. Click 90°, 180° or 270° to choose the turn; 0° keeps the orientation the clip was recorded in.
  3. Tick Flip horizontal or Flip vertical if the picture is mirrored, such as a selfie where text reads backwards.
  4. Check the printed output size, since a quarter turn swaps width and height (1920×1080 becomes 1080×1920).
  5. Click Export MP4, wait for the percentage to reach 100, then download the file named rotated-<your clip>.mp4.

A real turn, not a metadata hint

Container formats can store a rotation matrix that asks the player to turn the picture at playback time. It is cheap, but it is advisory: editors, upload pipelines and older players routinely ignore it, which is why a clip that looks correct in one app arrives sideways in another.

Here the pixels themselves are redrawn at the angle you pick and re-compressed, so the orientation survives anywhere the file goes. The cost is a full re-encode; the benefit is that nothing downstream gets a say in how your footage is displayed.

Flipping is mirroring, and it happens after the turn

Rotating moves the picture around its centre. Flipping reflects it, which is a different operation and is the one you want for a webcam or selfie capture where text reads backwards. The two compose: you can turn a clip upright and mirror it in the same pass.

The mirror is applied after the rotation, so on a clip turned ninety degrees, Flip horizontal reflects along the axis that is horizontal after the turn. That is the order that matches what people expect when they set both controls and look at the result.

Output dimensions and audio

Quarter turns exchange width for height: a 1920 by 1080 recording turned ninety degrees comes out 1080 by 1920. The panel prints the resulting size next to the source size so there is no surprise about what the file will be. Half turns and flips leave the dimensions untouched.

The soundtrack is carried through the re-encode rather than dropped. Orientation has nothing to do with audio, and a rotated clip that comes back silent would be a regression rather than a feature.

Rotation input formats, output and free limit

Your clip is turned inside this browser tab

Every frame is decoded, redrawn at the new angle and compressed again by your own browser, and the finished MP4 goes straight to your downloads folder. The rotation code makes no network request, so no copy of the footage is sent anywhere, there is no upload wait before the work begins, and nothing remains on a server to be deleted later.

Questions people ask about Video Rotator

Will I lose quality by turning a clip?
Some, because the frames are compressed a second time. The encoder targets a generous bitrate so the loss is not usually visible at normal viewing sizes, but repeatedly re-exporting the same footage through any lossy tool will accumulate softness over several rounds.
What is the difference between a one-eighty turn and flipping both ways?
Visually on most footage they look alike, but they are not the same transformation. A half turn preserves the handedness of the image, while mirroring on both axes reverses it, so any text in the shot stays readable under one and not the other.
My clip already plays upright but exports sideways — why?
Your player is honouring a rotation flag stored in the container while the underlying frames are stored sideways. Pick the angle that corrects the stored frames rather than what you see in that one player, then confirm with the printed output dimensions.
Does this work on files that are not MP4?
The picker accepts MP4, M4V and MOV, which covers essentially everything phones and cameras produce. Other containers would need a different demuxer than the one this page uses, so convert them first if you have something unusual.
How do I turn a horizontal video into a vertical one?
A 90° or 270° turn makes a landscape clip portrait, but the scene lies on its side along with the frame. If you want people and horizons to stay upright inside a tall frame, crop the landscape clip to 9:16 with the Video Cropper instead of rotating it.
Can I rotate a video by a custom angle?
No. The only choices are 0°, 90°, 180° and 270°, because quarter turns map every pixel onto the new frame with no empty corners to fill. Straightening a horizon tilted by a few degrees needs a rotate-and-crop editor, which this page does not include.
How do I mirror a selfie or webcam video?
Leave the rotation at 0°, tick Flip horizontal and export. Left and right swap, so writing in the shot reads the right way round; if the clip is also sideways, pick the angle as well, because the mirror is applied after the turn.
Is my video uploaded to rotate it?
No. The page reads the file from your disk, re-encodes it with the WebCodecs encoder built into your browser and hands the result back through a download link, so the clip never reaches our servers or any third party.
Can I rotate a video on my iPhone or Android?
Only if the phone's browser exposes the WebCodecs video encoder with H.264 output, which the page checks as soon as it opens. When that support is missing you see a red warning and export stays disabled; we have not tested particular phone models, so try yours.

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Content reviewed 2026-09-27.