Windows Has Video File Resolution Wrong - How to Change?

Hi all,

I have a .mp4 video file on my computer that was recorded vertically via cell phone, with the resolution 1080 x 1920 (width x height). However, when I go into the properties menu of this file, Windows believes that the video is 1920 x 1080 (width x height) - normally this would not be a problem, except that all of my video editing software reads that data from Windows and crops and compresses and squashes the video in exciting and interesting ways when I try to open it, since it's being told that the video is wide and not tall.

Is there a way to edit the video properties via Windows or some other utility to correct the resolution?

Thanks!

pepanee said:

There's a free video editing app called HandBrake: HandBrake: Open Source Video Transcoder
It may have an option to let you convert the video to any custom resolution you want.

Possibly - the issue isn't so much that the video isn't at the right resolution, it's that the file information is wrong. What I mean by this is that if I click on the video and open it in, say, Windows Photo and Video viewer or whatever the default program is, it displays just fine. But if I right-click on the "properties" of the file it says that the Frame Width is 1920 and the Frame Height is 1080, which it isn't - the width is 1080 and the height is 1920. As such, it opens up with the wrong aspect ratio in, for example, Hitfilm Express (top and bottom of the video are cut off with black bars on the sides) and Flowframes (video appears very 'squashed' with black bars at the top and bottom) as they both think the video is 1920W x 1080H.

That said, this does actually open up the idea that I could conceivably open the video in some video editing application, rotate it 90 degrees one way, rotate it again back 90 degrees the other way, and then save it and that would maybe save the correct resolution in Windows, but I'm not sure how well that would work or if it would do anything to the video quality.

Hi Bree, I appreciate the recommendation - however, the issue is not so much that the video's resolution is wrong itself, it's that Windows has the wrong resolution saved in the file information. The video plays fine and looks fine, I just can't open it in any video editing software due to the incorrect file information. I apologize if I am not making myself clear, it's a bit difficult to explain the issue.

For photo's, orientation is defined in the EXIF orientation flag. Windows reads that. When the position is wrong and you rotate in Windows, Windows modifies the EXIF orientation flag. All viewer programs, reading it, show the correct(ed) Window position. Viewer programs which do not use it, may display a wrong position. Presumably, the same principle is working with video's. In my opinion, it is not a fault in Windows, but a shortcoming of the video editing program.

Bree said:

It's odd that the video plays horizontally, but declares itself to be a vertical format. For all phone-created videos I have seen the two are in agreement.

If you tell FFMpeg to copy the video and audio streams unchanged, then it may rewrite the rest of the metadata with the correct values. If you do not specify parameters such as aspect ratio then FFMpeg tries to determine the values to use from the datastream itself.

FFMpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy output.mp4

I will give that a try! And yeah, it's weird. I took three videos within a few minutes of each other (it was of my band rehearsing a new set list) - two of the videos were recorded horizontally and one was recorded vertically, and all of them play correctly, however Windows seems to think all three of them are horizontal according to the EXIF/metadata/whatever it's called. It's an interesting puzzle!

No, it is not weird. The EXIF info comes from the camera. Windows uses that, and therefore positions are right in Windows. Your video editing program does not use the position flag, provided by the camera

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