Snapwood Apps

Photo Gallery and Slideshow Apps

Why are my videos rotated 90 degrees?

The iPhone (and a few other devices) will always record videos in a horizontal orientation. If the video is a vertical / portrait video, the iPhone requests the video decoder to rotate the video back to vertical during playback.

Unfortunately, many Android TV devices ignore (or are incapable of honoring) this rotation. Since the video isn’t rotated by the decoder, the horizontal recording is displayed in a vertical player. But the rotation is wrong!

In my experience, the Google TV with Chromecast dongle correctly plays vertical iPhone videos. As of 2021, the Amazon Fire TV Sticks and Sony Bravia TVs will not rotate videos to the vertical. Possibly this will change in the future, but right now those devices are incapable of hardware decoding vertical iPhone videos. You must turn off hardware acceleration in my apps to correctly orient these videos.

So what can I do?

  1. If the videos are 1080p or less, try turning off hardware acceleration to bypass the device’s decoder. You can do this by entering the app settings, go to Display, and uncheck “Hardware Accelerate Videos”. While this will work for 4K videos, those typically require HEVC / h.265 and turning off acceleration will result in choppy playback.
  2. You can install VLC and use it has your video player by entering the app settings, go to Display, and then check “Use VLC”. VLC prefers software decoding if it runs into any problems with the hardware decoder so it will likely be too slow for 4K videos.
  3. You can copy the files to a service that automatically transcodes videos into widely compatible formats, such as Flickr or Google Photos. This will likely resize 4K videos to 1080p, however.
  4. You can manually re-encode the videos to remove the requirement for rotation, to increase compatibility and to convert the videos into lower bandwidth versions that help with streaming. It is important to realize that many cloud drive services are not video streaming services and playing raw 4K videos from them can use 6 to 8 MB/s. This is a high requirement on a lot of internet connections.