How to fix sideways video recordings from browser-based camera apps on mobile
A developer building a browser-based teleprompter that records via the front camera spent three nights debugging a persistent issue where recorded video came out sideways or severely zoomed in on iOS and Android. The root cause is that mobile browsers return a landscape sensor buffer and apply a rotation flag to display it correctly in the preview, but that flag is not always written into the recorded file. Requesting camera dimensions in landscape format (1920x1080) rather than portrait (1080x1920) aligns with how WebRTC handles mobile sensors and is the first necessary fix. Because the rotation metadata has disappeared in iOS 26.6 and is unreliable on Android Chrome, the developer created a pixel-sampling probe that draws a single frame onto a 16-pixel canvas to detect the actual orientation of the drawn image. Using that probe before recording allows the app to correctly size the canvas capture and avoid cropping errors that previously produced an extreme zoom on the subject's face.
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