How to delete a single metadata item from an MP4 file

Question

Context and question

I recorded a video with my MotoG3 phone Android phone and the resulting video (perhaps due to shaking the phone) plays rotated, that is, vertically, which is not something that I want. The video was saved in an MP4 container.

Upon inspecting the file that was recorded, I saw (using both ffprobe and mediainfo) that it contains a flag that indicates that the video stream is rotated 90 degrees, which explains the rotation while playing the video. Here is the output from ffprobe:

$ ffprobe -hide_banner ~/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4 
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/home/rbrito/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : mp42
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: isommp42
    creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
    com.android.version: 6.0
  Duration: 00:17:01.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 17134 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1920x1080, 17000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 29 fps, 29.42 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      rotate          : 90
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : VideoHandle
      encoder         : MOTO
    Side data:
      displaymatrix: rotation of -90.00 degrees
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 128 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : SoundHandle

Since this video is from one rare event with my son, I would like to minimally change the video file, preferrably, only removing the rotation metadata and nothing else.

Unfortunately, using information from other answers didn't help. I tried using:

ffmpeg -i ~/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4 -c copy -metadata:s:v:0 rotate=0 -an vid_20160619_170845475_unrotated.mp4

But other metadata, like the date etc. are not present in the resulting file. This, in particular, makes organizer programs be confused while showing the files by date, among other things.

Is there any way of minimally changing the input data (possibly remuxing it) so as to keep it as close as possible to the original data? In particular, I don't want to reencode the file.

Any tools that are available under Linux are preferred.

---

Extra information

Since the full output of ffmpeg was asked, here it goes. This is a pure Debian testing userland.

As a side note, ffmpeg is complaining about mismatched libraries because it is compiled two times in Debian, once without potentially problematic codecs and another with some extra codecs. I'm using the version with extra codecs, but I suppose that that doesn't matter, since only the muxing is being used here.

Metadata before remuxing

$ ffprobe  -hide_banner ~/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/home/rbrito/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : mp42
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: isommp42
    creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
    com.android.version: 6.0
  Duration: 00:17:01.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 17134 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1920x1080, 17000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 29 fps, 29.42 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      rotate          : 90
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : VideoHandle
      encoder         : MOTO
    Side data:
      displaymatrix: rotation of -90.00 degrees
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 128 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : SoundHandle

The remuxing process

Note here that the audio metadata is not copied (which I expected, due to the -metadata:s:v:0 option) and ffmpeg tells me that it is copying the video metadata (without the rotation setting).

$ ffmpeg -hide_banner -i ~/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4 -c copy -metadata:s:v:0 rotate=0 -an vid_20160619_170845475_unrotated.mp4 
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '/home/rbrito/Pictures/2016/06/19/vid_20160619_170845475.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : mp42
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: isommp42
    creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
    com.android.version: 6.0
  Duration: 00:17:01.96, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 17134 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1920x1080, 17000 kb/s, SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9, 29 fps, 29.42 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      rotate          : 90
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : VideoHandle
      encoder         : MOTO
    Side data:
      displaymatrix: rotation of -90.00 degrees
    Stream #0:1(eng): Audio: aac (LC) (mp4a / 0x6134706D), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 128 kb/s (default)
    Metadata:
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : SoundHandle
Output #0, mp4, to 'vid_20160619_170845475_unrotated.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : mp42
    minor_version   : 0
    compatible_brands: isommp42
    com.android.version: 6.0
    encoder         : Lavf57.25.100
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 ([33][0][0][0] / 0x0021), yuv420p, 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], q=2-31, 17000 kb/s, 29 fps, 29.42 tbr, 90k tbn, 90k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      encoder         : MOTO
      creation_time   : 2016-06-19 20:25:49
      handler_name    : VideoHandle
      rotate          : 0
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (copy)
Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
frame=29640 fps=403 q=-1.0 Lsize= 2121038kB time=00:17:01.91 bitrate=17003.0kbits/s speed=13.9x    
video:2120800kB audio:0kB subtitle:0kB other streams:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead: 0.011211%

Metadata after remuxing

Note here that there is no video metadata in the output, only container-level metadata.

$ ffprobe -hide_banner vid_20160619_170845475_unrotated.mp4 
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'vid_20160619_170845475_unrotated.mp4':
  Metadata:
    major_brand     : isom
    minor_version   : 512
    compatible_brands: isomiso2avc1mp41
    encoder         : Lavf57.25.100
  Duration: 00:17:01.95, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 17002 kb/s
    Stream #0:0(eng): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 1920x1080, 17000 kb/s, 29 fps, 29.42 tbr, 90k tbn, 180k tbc (default)
    Metadata:
      handler_name    : VideoHandler

Solution

FFmpeg by default doesn't transfer most user metadata over, but it does transfer fields like rotation tag.

The command below instructs FFmpeg to transfer all metadata over but then overrides the rotation tag value.

ffmpeg -i in.mp4 -c copy -map_metadata 0 -metadata:s:v:0 rotate=0 -an out.mp4