Rotate and flip video with FFmpeg: phone footage, EXIF metadata, and the right approach

When to use this

You rotate or flip video for phone-shot content recorded sideways (orientation metadata works in some players, fails in others — re-encoding with the correct rotation is universal), creating mirror effects (selfie-mode where on-screen text needs to read correctly), or generating multiple aspect-ratio variants from one source. The orientation problem is more common than most teams realize: iOS records EXIF rotation tags that desktop players ignore.

Command variants

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "transpose=1" \
  -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 21 \
  -c:a copy \
  output.mp4

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "transpose=1,transpose=1" \
  -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 21 \
  -c:a copy \
  output.mp4

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -vf "hflip" \
  -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 21 \
  -c:a copy \
  output.mp4

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 \
  -metadata:s:v rotate=0 \
  -c copy \
  output.mp4

What each parameter does

• transpose=N

  0=90° counter-clockwise + vertical flip, 1=90° clockwise, 2=90° counter-clockwise, 3=90° clockwise + vertical flip. Most common: 1 (clockwise) and 2 (counter-clockwise).

• hflip

  Horizontal flip (left-right mirror).

• vflip

  Vertical flip (top-bottom flip).

• -metadata:s:v rotate=0

  Set the video stream's rotation metadata to 0 without re-encoding. Stream-copy with this flag strips the rotation tag.

What this outputs

A re-encoded (or stream-copied) video file with the rotation/flip applied. Re-encoding is required for transpose/hflip/vflip; stream-copy works only for metadata stripping.

Pitfalls

1. EXIF rotation metadata is interpreted differently across players. Web/Chrome usually respects it; QuickTime sometimes doesn't; FFmpeg-based tooling sometimes mishandles it. For universal playback, re-encode with the correct rotation rather than relying on metadata.
2. Stripping metadata without re-encoding doesn't change pixel data — players that ignored the tag will still play correctly; players that respected the tag will now show the original (uncorrected) orientation.
3. Rotating/flipping resets aspect ratio. Players display the new orientation natively but downstream tooling may need explicit aspect-ratio updates.
4. Phones often record at high resolution (4K/60fps) — rotating these is expensive. For social-media output where lower resolution is acceptable, scale before rotating to save compute.
5. Transpose chains (transpose=1,transpose=1 for 180°) are equivalent to hflip+vflip but slightly slower. Use hflip+vflip for 180° rotations.

At production scale

Rotation requires re-encoding (libx264-bound), so it's not free at scale. For UGC pipelines processing phone-shot content, the rotation step roughly doubles the encoding cost. NVENC GPU encoding handles rotation natively at GPU speeds.

MpegFlow detects orientation metadata at ingest and routes phone-shot content to a rotation stage automatically. The audit log records both the original and corrected orientation.

• FFmpeg
• rotate
• flip
• video-operations

• Recipe
  Crop Video
• Recipe
  Resize Scale Video