Interactive zoom and rotation not working when the video is opened in portrait.

[freemp]

Hello

I have two different problems closely linked.

On some videos, the predefined rotations (like 90, 270, etc degrees) simply don't work (it doesn't change at all the video).
And when I manually rotate using the rotation button, it will indeed rotate the video but cut a part of it.

To understand what I mean by cut "a part of it", consider a video taken with a phone in portrait mode, lets say width L and height H. If I rotate, the video will indeed rotate but will be cut such that the maximum width will still be L. So I will lose some part of the video, on right and left, if I want to rotate it from a "portrait" format to a landscape one.

Also, on those video the interactive zoom doesn't work. Like I indeed have a miniscreen appearing allowing me to do the interactive zoom but I can't change any options of the interactive zoom when enabled (like how much it zoom, on which part of the screen etc).

I tried to figure out when it doesn't work and when it does and I figured out that it doesn't work when VLC open my video in "portrait" mode. When it opens it in Landscape I usually don't have the interactive zoom problems.
The very important thing to understand is that all those videos were filmed with the same smartphone (galaxy S6), with the same quality. I am almost sure I never told my phone "take this in portrait" or "take this in landscape". Maybe he understood it automatically. But anyway, I think what would solve my problem would be to tell VLC to consider that all the videos it opens are in landscape format (because I don't have the problems there).

In summary, how could I change the format of my video from portrait to landscape, or how to solve my problem ?

It is not a vision of mind those portrait/landscape, on windows when the video work they have the little "movie" border like on the image "Amazon deforestation". When they don't work they don't have those border like on the image 5 Guys in a Limo, see this picture : (i took a picture from internet because I didn't see how to upload an image here, but anyway as long as you understand what I mean it is ok !).

PS : I am on windows 10 (I don't know if it could be windows related).
PS2 : Of course I could try to open all the videos with an editing video software and find a way to save them as a landscape but I would really like to avoid it. I would like to find a way, either telling VLC directly to open everything in landscape, either to solve this bug avoiding to rotate or interacting zoom on portrait video.

Does anyone has an idea ?

Thank you.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

This will be fixed in a couple of days.

[freemp]

Hello

I downloaded the last version of VLC that appear few days ago and the problem is still here

[waiho]

Interactive zoom is still not working. It wouldn't let me to move the small little square at all. Please advise by return. Thank you

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Interactive zoom is still not working. It wouldn't let me to move the small little square at all. Please advise by return. Thank you

Disable hardware decoding and tell us if that works.

[jasonius]

Hi, I have the same problem and disabling hardware-accelerated decoding did NOT help.

[humdrumoglief1]

I am bumping this old thread because I am having the same issue since updating my vlc. Videos in the portrait mode seem to have a problem with not being able to crop, zoom etc

[papab]

Same issue. When video is in portrait mode I can't control zoom box. It does not fix it if I Transform or Rotate the video.
VLC 3.0.8
ubuntu 18.04.2

Also, all the links to the documentation are broken.

[stormbono]

Still not working...

[ratamacue97]

The date of this is March 30, 2020 and the VLC version I am now using is 3.0.8 . Windows 10 Pro. I'm providing a lot of details so that maybe someone can do some forensics and determine the source of the problem.
So, I have this problem and have seen the posts about using videoproc and also this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqJmWqnddeU called "Rotate & Save a Video using VLC Media Player" .
I did not try videoproc because of admin issues, and I tried the second one and I could not get VLC to complete the conversion process. This was before updating to VLC version 3.0.8 . Sadly, I do not know what the previous version was. I did not try the youtube-described process with version 3.0.8 .

My observations with regards to the interactive zoom are only based upon VLC version 3.0.8 :

For purposes of the description that follows, the interactive zoom on-screen controls consist of a "rectangle", a "box" that moves, the zoom level "funnel", and the "text" which hides the other controls. The original location of the interactive zoom controls consisted of the rectangle in the upper left corner, the box inside that you could move around within the rectangle, the text under the rectangle, and the funnel under the text.

Prior to upgrading to version 3.0.8, my situation was that I had a video taken with a phone camera and the video is in portrait mode. I wanted to use interactive zoom because the other fixed zooms did not allow me to scroll around the video to locate the particular portion of the video I needed to see. The very first time I tried the interactive zoom (with the prior version), it worked perfectly. It was great! Some days later, someone sent me an instructional video and the whole video was zoomed in on a particular area and I did not know what was going on. Somehow the interactive zoom was turned on , I did not see the controls on the screen because of some aliasing , or maybe the resolution....I don't know...., and turning interactive zoom off fixed the problem. The next time I want back to my original video in portrait mode, the zoom does not work, and the controls appeared on the upper right corner of the video, and appeared rotated +90° from its original position. So, using my description wording, the top (long side) of the rectangle was against the right side of the video, the box was still inside, the text was to the left of the bottom of the rectangle and the funnel was to the left of the text -- everything was rotated +90° and put on the right side in the top right corner of the video.

Somehow, by accident, I realized that if I put my cursor in the upper left corner of the video's area, and pretended that the interactive zoom controls were still in the original upper left corner location, I was able to move the box around in the rectangle that was in the upper right corner !! Whoa! You move the "imaginary" box up and down, and the visible box moves right and left in the 90° visible rectangle in the upper right corner. Maybe this works for others. After playing with this, I said, "OK, I can live with this". The problem is that I could not reliably control the funnel zoom because I couldn't quite figure out exactly were it was. (Full disclosure: I have trouble controlling that when i use it for landscape videos -- it is not easy to finely control the zoom level funnel which occupies such a small overall graphic area, with such a tiny portion at the bottom!) The other problem is that while trying to randomly attempt to find the funnel, I would hit the text, and the whole display would "hide" (as it would normally do). Then I just re-open the file.

That's all I got. Maybe the designer of the interactive zoom can use this information. VLC media player has been my goto media player for a while, and the "Jump to time (Previous frame) v3" is an amazing addition. Learning about the interactive zoom was icing on the cake, so maybe one of the contributors can figure out this bug. I'm only posting this in this thread -- there are other similar threads, but this one has the most views. Feel free to put it where you wish.

[erfl]

So it's almost March 2021, and this still seems to be a problem.

[roster]

It's June of 2022, still is a uniwersity math for VLC to enlarge the picture (disabled hardware decoding)