Flip or mirror a video
Mirror a video horizontally or vertically — un-mirror a selfie or webcam clip — and export a clean MP4. Runs entirely on your device, no watermark.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
First use downloads the 10 MB video engine from this site. After that it is cached and works offline. It is WebAssembly served from onthisdevice.com — no third-party CDN — and your file is still processed entirely on your own device.
Mirror, not rotate
Flipping reflects the frame across an axis. A horizontal flip swaps left and right, the way a bathroom mirror does; a vertical flip swaps top and bottom. Rotation, by contrast, turns the whole frame around its centre and never reverses anything. The two are often confused, and picking the wrong one produces a video that is upside down and backwards.
A quick test: if writing in the shot currently reads correctly and you want it to keep reading correctly, you want rotation. If writing in the shot reads backwards, you want a horizontal flip.
The webcam mirroring problem
Video-call software shows your own camera feed mirrored, because an un-mirrored preview feels wrong — you move your left hand and the person on screen moves their right. Most apps only mirror the preview and record the true image, but some record what you saw. When they do, every logo, label and whiteboard in the shot comes out reversed.
A horizontal flip fixes it in one pass. It is also the right tool when a recording was made through a mirror or a prism-based rig, or when a phone’s front camera saved the mirrored version.
Where each direction is useful
| Flip | What it does | Typical reason |
|---|---|---|
| Horizontal | Left and right swap | Un-mirroring a selfie or webcam clip; reversing text; making a dance or exercise tutorial follow along on the correct side |
| Vertical | Top and bottom swap | Footage from an inverted camera mount, a microscope, a telescope or a ceiling-mounted action camera |
| Both | Identical to a 180° rotation | Convenience — flipping twice and rotating once produce the same frame |
Why flipping needs a re-encode
There is no metadata flag for mirroring the way there is for rotation. Containers can say "turn this 90 degrees"; none of them can say "reflect this". So the only way to flip a video is to decode every frame, reverse the pixel order and encode it again. The mirror itself is exactly lossless — no pixel value changes — but the H.264 compression runs a second time around it.
At the default quality that second pass is not visible. If the clip is going into an editor for further work, choose the high quality preset under advanced options, because each generation of re-encoding compounds.
Check it before you export
The preview above applies the flip live with CSS, so you can play the clip and confirm that
the result is what you meant before spending encoding time on it. The flip is applied to the
exported file with FFmpeg’s hflip and vflip filters, which are the
same operations that every desktop editor uses under the hood.
Local, unwatermarked, unlimited
The video is processed inside this tab and nothing is transmitted. There is no watermark on the export, no cap on the length of the clip and no account to create — the three things that make free online editors frustrating for a job that takes one click.
Questions
What is the difference between flipping and rotating?
Rotating turns the picture around its centre and keeps it the right way round. Flipping mirrors it, so left becomes right — text in the frame reads backwards afterwards. If your goal is to fix a sideways clip, you want rotation, not flipping.
Why does my webcam video look mirrored?
Video-call apps mirror your own preview so that moving left on screen matches moving left in real life. Some of them record what you saw rather than what the camera saw, which leaves any writing in the shot backwards. A horizontal flip puts it right.
Does flipping lose quality?
A mirror is a lossless operation on the pixels, but it cannot be done without re-encoding, so the H.264 compression runs a second time. At the default quality the difference is not visible; choose “high quality” if the clip will be edited further.
Can I flip and rotate in one pass?
Not on this page — it does one transform at a time so the preview stays honest. Run the file through the rotate tool afterwards if you need both; the second pass costs one more re-encode.