[Quick Tip] Single Command to Rotate a Video in Ubuntu Linux

Got a video playing upside down? Here’s an easy way to rotate it via a single command in Ubuntu.

There are a few video players, e.g., SMPlayer, support for rotating by 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise during video playback.

If you want to make it permanent by exporting video rotated, besides using a heavy video editing tool, e.g., Pitivi and Openshot, the single command in this tutorial may help.

upside down video

An upside down video

1. Install FFmpeg:

Firstly install FFmpeg if you don’t have it. FFmpeg is a large suite of libraries and programs for handling multi-media files and streams.

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It is very popular and most likely already installed on your system, if you have any audio, video, and other multimedia relevant applications installed.

To make sure, open terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and run command:

2. Command to rotate video:

Now you can run the single command to rotate a video:

ffmpeg -i input-video.mp4 -vf "transpose=1" output-video.mp4

Before this command, you may first navigate to the video folder either via cd command (e.g., cd ~/Videos), or in file browser go to the folder and right-click blank area and select “Open in Terminal”.

In the command, the number in “transpose=1” can also be:

  • 0 – means rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip
  • 1 – means rotate by 90 degrees clockwise
  • 2 – means rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise
  • 3 – means rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip

In my case, the command is:

ffmpeg -i ~/Videos/aisha.mp4 -vf "transpose=1" ~/Videos/aisha-rotated.mp4

And depends on the video size and your CPU, the process may take a few minutes.