Detect video rotation using ffmpeg and cv2 in python

1_rotation_in_ffmpeg.py

import ffmpeg

def get_rotation(video_file_path: str):
    try:
        # fetch video metadata
        metadata = ffmpeg.probe(video_file_path)
    except Exception as e:
        print(f'failed to read video: {video_file_path}\n'
              f'{e}\n',
              end='',
              flush=True)
        return None
    # extract rotate info from metadata
    video_stream = next((stream for stream in metadata['streams'] if stream['codec_type'] == 'video'), None)
    rotation = int(video_stream.get('tags', {}).get('rotate', 0))
    # extract rotation info from side_data_list, popular for Iphones
    if len(video_stream.get('side_data_list', [])) != 0:
        side_data = next(iter(video_stream.get('side_data_list')))
        side_data_rotation = int(side_data.get('rotation', 0))
        if side_data_rotation != 0:
            rotation -= side_data_rotation
    return rotation

2_rotation_code_in_opencv.py

import cv2

def get_rotation_code(video_file_path: str):
    rotation = get_rotation(video_file_path)
    rotation_code = None
    if rotation == 180:
        rotation_code = cv2.ROTATE_180
    if rotation == 90:
        rotation_code = cv2.ROTATE_90_CLOCKWISE
    if rotation == 270:
        rotation_code = cv2.ROTATE_90_COUNTERCLOCKWISE
    return rotation_code

3_detect_video_rotation_in_python.md

Tested using:

• ffprobe version 4.4.2-0ubuntu0.22.04.1.
• ffmpeg-python==0.2.0 package from pip.
• (Optional, for get_rotation_code()) opencv-contrib-python==4.6.0.66 package from pip.

get_rotation is intentionally separated for those not using opencv. Another note: this code expects given file to always have one stream that has codec_type to be video, if your use case might have otherwise (example of audio only files), modify the code to handle such exceptions.