title: Why are Iphone videos upside down?
body: <p>I have a video file captured using the standard Camera app copied off my Iphone5 using <a href="http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html" rel="nofollow">btsync</a>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>orig.mov: ISO Media, Apple QuickTime movie
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That plays <strong>upside down</strong> in mplayer or vlc.</p>
  
  <p>When I transcode it using AWS's elastictranscoder using a standard preset:</p>
  
  <pre><code>elastictranscoder.mpg: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>That transcoded video file plays back the right way up.</p>
  
  <p>When <a href="https://github.com/kaihendry/recordmydesktop2.0/blob/master/htmlvideo" rel="nofollow">transcoding myself</a>, using ffmpeg I need to explicitly rotate the video otherwise the resulting {mp4,webm} files are upside down.</p>
  
  <p>So I am guessing AWS's elastictranscoder auto rotates the video somehow. However why is the video upside down to begin with?</p>