It’s 2016, why is rotating a video such a pain?

How many times have you quickly shot a video on your phone and not rotated it for landscape? It happens too often and we see these videos all over social media. I sometimes forget to do it as well, or portrait is more in line with what I am shooting. So, I want to quickly rotate a video 90 degrees sometimes. Should be easy, right?

I’ve asked friends and social media before, but I asked again last night and got a lot of great input. My criteria were very simple, but I did not specify platform; I want to load an MP4 video, rotate it 90 degrees, and save it. I didn’t qualify it, but my expectations are that it would not lose quality, it would keep the original MP4 format, and that the process was “one-click” (or close). While I have plenty of history using Linux, going back to CLI graphics tools to do this is not ideal for me, but I considered those options.

• @cl suggested Windows Movie Maker – It will rotate trivially, but saves your MP4 as WMV and the quality drops noticeably.
• @TCMBC suggested mencoder – A command line utility, part of MPlayer. So it is not trivial (download, configure, compile, figure out CLI syntax), but it does rotate. Yet, the quality drops noticeably.
• @viss suggested ffmpeg – A command line utility and graphics library, not so trivial. It did rotate, but the quality drops noticeably.
• @viss suggested The ‘Rotate My Video‘ web site – It is a bit slow for file upload and conversion, but very easy to use. It played the video correctly in my browser, but when I saved the video the final copy was not rotated.
• @DeviantOllam suggested (in DM) the Rotate Video FX app for Android – I thought the UX wasn’t intuitive for starters. It did rotate the video for immediate playback, but no apparently way to save the new video back to the device. Sharing it brings up the usual Android options, but uploading the video to google drive and the video was not rotated.
• @elkentaro suggested Apple’s QuickTime Player – Even with his reference which is outdated, there is no apparent rotation function. Even the ability to save a file is now ‘Pro’ only.
• MegaManSec suggested ImageMagick ‘convert’ utility – this didn’t work and gave me a nice reminder of the old ‘terminal flash attacks’ from the early 90s.
• @DeviantOllum suggested Virtual Dub but warned me that some versions handle MP4 and some don’t. Thus, I didn’t try it.
• @Grifter801 suggested VLC but qualified it “just for viewing”.
• @mehebner suggested Open Shot Video Player but said it is Linux only, which isn’t convenient.
• @cl suggested iMovie but it is Mac OS X only, which isn’t convenient.
• @cl suggested Facebook but he isn’t sure you can save after. I am fairly sure you lose quality though.

The final recommendation, and the one that worked the best for me, is Handbrake suggested by @bmirvine. The upside is I had it installed (but an old version) and am familiar with it to a degree. The best part about conversion is that the video does not lose any quality. The downside is trying to figure out the ‘Extra Option’ argument to rotate is a raging mess, as seen on this thread. I found that using “, –rotate=4” as the extra option worked for version 0.10.5.0 64-bit (latest as of this blog). The only other annoyance is that Windows won’t show a thumbnail of the newly saved video for some reason. [Update: with a newer version of the K-Lite codec pack, the thumbnails render fine.]

There are my quick testing results. I hope it helps. I’d like to give a big round of thanks to all who contributed ideas late night. Reminds me that Twitter has some value and isn’t a cesspool of insipid political tripe. =)