Can I set rotation field for a video stream with FFmpeg?

This works with recent FFmpeg:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -c copy -metadata:s:v:0 rotate=90 output.mp4

This will stream copy the bitstreams, so no encoding is performed. Only the metadata of the first video stream (v:0) is changed here and the player will show the video in a rotated way. (Not all players will support this.)

Additional notes:

• If you want to “physically” rotate the video, you have to use the transpose filter. Filtering will require re-encoding, so you will have to remove -c copy.

• If you omit -c copy, and want to encode instead of only re-muxing, then ffmpeg will automatically rotate the video if there is any existing rotate metadata. You can disable this behavior with -noautorotate.