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Do all android phones store videos with rotational metadata?

For example, I just recorded a video on my 'phone', holding it in portrait, and using the front-facing camera (used the front facing camera so I can easily see what I am recording, with me on the same side of the 'phone' as what I am recording).

C:\blah>mediainfo VID_20210106_215520866.mp4
.....    
Rotation                                 : 90°
....
C:\blah>

There's rotational metadata there so instructing video players to rotate it 90 degrees clockwise for it to be oriented the right way up.

I'd rather a phone that records it the right way without rotational metadata.. so I was wondering if it was phone specific or something to do with Android.

I thought the problem may be unique to my Moto G7 Power, as I asked somebody else that had the same 'phone' and they claimed that they didn't have that with theirs(though I doubt their claim). Then I got another 'phone', an Oppo. And it too did the same thing.

I then ran into this webpage which suggests that it's actually an Android feature.

Do all Android phones place rotational metadata on videos they record with 'phone' in portrait position?

While I normally get that so eg if it were recording a person, then their feet on the right, their head on the left.(hence 90 degrees clockwise rotation required), funnily enough i've also had videos come out oriented 90 degrees the other way and so have rotational metadata of 270 degrees e.g. if it were recording me then my feet on the left my head on the right, requiring and having metadata instructing 270 degrees clockwise / 90 degrees anti-clockwise rotation.

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  • interesting side note I think it looks like maybe now, youtube and google drive obey rotational metadata.. also WMP in W10 does. And maybe a quick way to remove it while having the video oriented right is simply ffmpeg -i vid.mp4 -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec libx264 xyz.mp4
    – barlop
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 1:14

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Videos recorded using mobile devices contain a lot of metadata. One piece of such data is the rotation metadata. This data is used by browsers such as Chrome and Safari and by video players like VLC and QuickTime to display the video the way it was shot: portrait or landscape. The rotation metadata is stored as an integer, it represents degrees, and has 4 possible values: 0, 90, 180 and 270. Here are the values for each device orientation for both iOS and Android:

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  • You just dumped lots of stuff irrelevant to answering the question. I'm well aware of the values and the purpose of them. And I see you just copy pasted from blog.addpipe.com/mp4-rotation-metadata-in-mobile-video-files or wherever they copy pasted. But anyhow it doesn't answer my question that was very specific
    – barlop
    Commented Jan 7, 2021 at 12:15

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