No thumbnail or properties after rotating portrait video with ffmpeg

[capncodfish]

I have been whipping my picture and video collection into shape for sensible network browsing and TV viewing. I have a ton of old videos in old formats that I am bringing up to mp4-x264 for viewing on all devices and great compression. A subset of this collection are some recorded-on-Android and recorded-on-iPhone portrait videos, mp4 and mov respectively. I have been trying to rotate them using ffmpeg v3.1.5. I use the following command on those:

ffmpeg -i VID_20150919_121521.mov VID_20150919_121521-2.mp4

No bells and whistles. Just letting ffmpeg do it's thing. Apparently, with the most recent versions of ffmpeg, it reads any rotation metadata and auto-rotates for you. Awesome. Now, the output is technically correct, I think, I mean, VLC plays them in the correct orientation now, but, unlike all my converted landscape videos, none of the portrait videos get a generated thumbnail in Windows 7 Explorer and in the properties details there is no frame width and height or frame rate info.

VLC, exiftool, and ffmpeg all "see" the rotated dimensions and frame rate why does Explorer not? Does it not like portrait videos or is there something I can add to the ffmpeg command?

Thanks!

[Baldrick]

I have no idea why it wont work with Explorer.

But you could try install icaros and see if thumbnails works better.

[capncodfish]

Still no answer to this, but setting the rotation metadata in the target file seems to be a decent solution. Explorer is happy and all recent video players seem to read the rotation field and do the right the thing. Installed Icaros anyways. Nice program. Thumbs and details for mkv's is great. Thanks.