How to flip a video on Windows 10 with Handbrake

Editing a video is easy if all you want to do is trim it a bit, or extract a frame from it. For other more complicated edits such as cropping a video, or even flipping it, your average video editor won’t do the job. Fortunately, there’s Handbrake. It’s feature rich, it’s free, and if you need to flip a video, it’s more than up to the job.

Flip a video with Handbrake

Open Handbrake and add the video that you want to flip.

Once the video has been added, go to the Filters tab and select the ‘Flip’ option. Set a place to save the output file and click ‘Start Encode’ at the top. The video will be flipped however, the process will take more time if the video is longer and in higher quality.

Flipping a video does change it however, it can be reversed. All you have to do is flip the video over again and it will be back the way it was. Much like flipping an image is reversible, so is this.

The flip is along the x-axis and there isn’t a setting that lets you flip it along the y-axis. If you need to flip a video along the y-axis, try rotating it first. You can do that in Handbrake from the Filters tab. Rotate it by 180 degrees and select the flip option to see if that does the trick. You may or may not be satisfied with the results though. This is a hack way to flip a video along the y-axis so you won’t always get the same results as you would get when you flip along the x-axis.

It’s important to know that there’s a difference between flipping and rotating a video. Rotation has to do with its orientation or what angle the video is. Flipping is mirroring and it’s easiest to understand if you flip a video that has some text in it. In the screenshot of the flipped video above, you can see that the text is now backwards.

If you still have trouble with the concept of flipping a video, try one that is either all text or one with a pattern that isn’t symmetrical and it will be easier to tell. If you intend to both rotate a video and flip it, it’s a good idea to rotate it first and then flip. Assuming you’re using Handbrake to do the job, it has a neat live preview feature that you can use to see what the video will look like before you convert the whole thing.