Can I set rotation field for a video stream with FFmpeg?

Question

I have a video file. I open it with MediaInfo utility and I can see a video stream in this file having attribute Rotation 90 (along with other attributes such as CodecID, bitrate etc).

Now I have another video file which does not have that attribute Rotation 90, it does not have the Rotation attribute at all.

Can I use ffmpeg.exe so that it produces output file with Rotation 90 attribute added and with no other changes? I don't really want to do any transform, just want to set the Rotation attribute.

I've tried the -metadata option to no avail.

Answer 1

This works with recent FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -metadata:s:v:0 rotate=90 output.mp4 

This will stream copy the bitstreams, so no encoding is performed. Only the metadata of the first video stream (v:0) is changed here and the player will show the video in a rotated way. (Not all players will support this.)

Additional notes:

• If you want to "physically" rotate the video, you have to use the transpose filter. Filtering will require re-encoding, so you will have to remove -c copy.

• If you omit -c copy, and want to encode instead of only re-muxing, then ffmpeg will automatically rotate the video if there is any existing rotate metadata. You can disable this behavior with -noautorotate.