[MPlayer-users] MP4 recorded in portrait with Android phone -> OK with VLC but landscape with MPlayer/HTML5

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 30.04.2013, at 17:59, Philip Rhoades <phil at pricom.com.au> wrote:
> People,
> 
> I have recorded a video in portrait with my Android phone (Samsung Galaxy Note 1 with nightly Cyanogen Mod v10.1).  After transferring the file to my Fedora 18 x86_64 server I find that the MP4 plays in landscape mode with mplayer and HTML5 (when viewed from a Fedora 18/Chrome laptop) but plays correctly in portrait mode with VLC - how does VLC know the correct orientation but MPlayer and the video driver with HTML do not?  I couldn't find any solutions with Googling . .

MOV can have arbitrary transformation matrices that are supposed to be applied before displaying. MPlayer so far ignores them

> I have not been able to test the HTML5 output with an OSX or Windows browser yet so I am not sure if it is a general problem but how can I ensure that the movies ALWAYS plays in portrait mode?

Ensure the video is actually recorded the right way round instead of just having a matrix in some file format header describe the orientation. Probably not something you can easily make happen.
For HTML5 you can use CSS rotate tags to manually rotate it, but of course that means you first need to figure out if it's necessary or not. The same applied to MPlayer and its rotate filter, which you can save in a per-file config file.