MP4 orientation issues

[druk]

Hi,

I recently shot some video with a Samsung Galaxy S5. If you rotate the phone and start recording BEFORE the phone has a chance to rotate the screen accordingly, the video's orientation will get screwed.

I have a couple of such videos. What's strange is, if you open them with AVIdemux, Media Player Classic or VLC, they play fine. But if you open them with the phone, or with Windows Media Player, the orientation is incorrect. Thumbnails in Windows are also incorrectly oriented.

Obviously, the video was correctly shot (orientation-wise). It just happens that the phone set some metadata incorrectly. And it looks like some players use that metadata to decide how to display the video, and some ignore it (or interpret it differently?).

So I guess I need to change this metadata in a way that all players will play the video correctly, but it doesn't look simple. For starters, I don't know which software is best for this. If I could find some useful software, then maybe I could experiment.

Any ideas?
Thank you.

[druk]

Exiftool looks good, but it seems that orientation metadata is called MatrixStructure and can't be changed.

[Cornucopia]

Use MediaInfo to get a detailed text readout of the header properties of your file(s). Then tell us which orientation the camera was actually recording in (landscape or portrait mode).

If they match, the apps which are acting wrong are the apps that are not correctly reading all the header info (particularly the rotation and/or AR/resolution fields). If they DON'T match, it might be that some apps are (mainly) looking at some info and other apps are (mainly) looking at others. It could be that a metadata change might be all that is needed to do the trick, or it could be that the file needs to be rotated and then re-saved (and re-compressed).

Scott

***Note: rotation data is usually only included in MOV, MP4 and/or MKV filetypes. That is not something that Exiftool would be able to see correctly.

[druk]

Here it is:

General
Complete name : D:\Desktop\test.mp4
Format : MPEG-4
Format profile : Base Media
Codec ID : isom
File size : 346 MiB
Duration : 2mn 49s
Overall bit rate : 17.1 Mbps
Encoded date : UTC 2014-08-14 17:41:30
Tagged date : UTC 2014-08-14 17:41:30

Video
ID : 1
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.0
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, ReFrames : 1 frame
Format settings, GOP : M=1, N=30
Codec ID : avc1
Codec ID/Info : Advanced Video Coding
Duration : 2mn 49s
Bit rate : 17.0 Mbps
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Rotation : 90°
Frame rate mode : Variable
Frame rate : 30.000 fps
Minimum frame rate : 28.865 fps
Maximum frame rate : 31.131 fps
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.273
Stream size : 343 MiB (99%)
Title : VideoHandle
Language : English
Encoded date : UTC 2014-08-14 17:41:30
Tagged date : UTC 2014-08-14 17:41:30

I'm guessing 90° is incorrect.

[Cornucopia]

So, was the video meant to be shot in landscape ( = ) or portrait ( || ) mode?

Note, though, that another complicating factor to all this playability is the fact that your video is VFR (variable framerate).

Scott

[druk]

It was shot in landscape.

[ndjamena]

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

[druk]

I'm testing the command you suggested. Will this operation be lossless?

[Cornucopia]

Yes

[druk]

Well, it did work perfectly. I'm really amazed that it also was lossless. I think this should be better documented in the ffmpeg help/manual/wiki/website or whatever, because it happens to many people who end up rotating the video lossily. Thank you!!!