How to rotate and flip videos using Handbrake

HandBrake is a free tool that’s available for Windows, Mac OS and Ubuntu that allows you to take a video in various formats and convert it to an MP4.

The steps below show how to rotate videos using HandBrake.

How to rotate and flip videos using Handbrake

  1. If you don’t already have HandBrake, it can be downloaded here:  https://handbrake.fr/
  2. Open HandBrake and load your video using the ‘Source’ button
  3. Choose where to save the rotated video by clicking on the ‘Browse’ button and select where the converted file will be saved.
  4. Open the ‘Filters’ tab
  5. The ‘Rotate’ option allows you to choose four different options
    1. 0 – do nothing
    2. 90 – rotate to the right
    3. 180 – turn upside down
    4. 270 – rotate to the left
  6. Choose the rotate option you require
  7. Click ‘Start Encode’ to begin
  8. At the bottom of the window you will see the progress

 

Help! It didn’t work

Try the manual way of rotating, by applying manual filters.

  1. Open the ‘Video’ tab
  2. Copy the desired command from below and paste into ‘Advanced Options’
  3. Once you have the required command entered, click ‘Start Encode’ to begin

Rotate 90 degrees clockwise

To rotate 90 degrees clockwise, enter the following command into the ‘Extra Options’ setting:

, --rotate=4

Rotate 90 degrees anti-clockwise

To rotate 90 degrees anti-clockwise, enter the following command into the ‘Extra Options’ setting:

, --rotate=7

Rotate 180 degrees (upside down)

To rotate 180 degrees so that the video is upside down, enter the following command into the ‘Extra Options’ setting:

, --rotate=3

Other options?

The official HandBrake documentation has more detail on what other options are available.

1 : x flip
2 : y flip
3 : 180 degrees rotate (also the DEFAULT)
4 : 90 degrees rotate (clockwise)
5 : 90 degrees rotate + y flip
6 : 270 degrees rotate + y flip
7 : 270 degrees rotate

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16 comments on “How to rotate and flip videos using Handbrake

  1. It seems handbrake has been hijacked by microsoft.

    I followed 2 different sets of instructions (one to manually enter the rotate values and one using the ‘filter’ tab). Sure, my video was rotated but it was also cropped it to a tiny sliver of its original width using a 405×520 display. There’s no function within the app to prevent this un-useful default setting and no way to restore the file to it’s original display size of 1280×720

  2. I used Handbrake, and it rotated fine, but the sound disappeared. The input was MyFile.AVI, the output the default m4v which I then edited to MyFile.mp4. The sound also disappears if I only do the conversion, no rotation. Codec Uncompressed 8-bit PC, Mono, 8000 Hz, 64kbps. How do I keep the sound? (I’ve used Handbrake before to convert VOB files to MP4 with no problem, no loss of sound.)

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