All the time. WMP is of windows 7 vintage. You need to use a modern media player such as those supplied on win 10 that recognize the orientation flag from a cell phone video. VLC works well.

Hi CadeG -

WMP (here) plays all 9:16 videos correctly, whether they're staight off a phone or produced in PDR. I'm running WMP 12, but it's not my go-to player.

In fact every single media player I just tested, plays 9:16 videos the right way up.

BUT I don't disagree with tomasc about using a more current player!

What's the phone you're using? What does MediaInfo say about its aspect ratio & resolution?

Cheers - Tony
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Quote I then export as what I would think is 9:16 but then the video is rotated 90 degrees again and views as 16:9 on Windows Media Player.

In addition to the helpful answers you've already received here, you would also want to ensure that you have PD's timeline aspect ratio set to 9:16, even though your clips display properly with it set to 16:9 or 4:3.

The reason is that all of the produce profiles (which I assume is what you mean by "export") are tailored to the same ratio as the project timeline, so you can't accidentally produce to 16:9, for example.. The produced video will also be formatted correctly when opened in any compatible player and will not have any black bars along the sides as filler.

WMP version 12 plays those portrait mode cell phone sideways on my pc. Here is one of the fixes: https://www.lifewire.com/rotate-video-in-windows-media-player-4164055 .

Haha - that's a funny link Tomas! "How to rotate a video in WMP"... use VLC

The exact version of WMP I'm using is 12.0.17763.1... and here's another funny thing... when I go to check whether I'm using the latest version, Microsoft tells me I'm running Win10 (64-bit) & WMP won't run on my system. Huh?

Here are a few 9:16 files (straight off phones) I've been using for testing Instagram IGTV uploads. See what they do in your WMP - they all play vertically here.

optodata's on task & makes a good point about project aspect ratio!

Cheers - Tony
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Thank you, Tony, for supplying the three cell phone videos. The first screenshot shows the WMP on the Google Pixel 2 that does not use the orientation flag, WMP about screen showing the version and the highlighted file icon playing. The other two show that they play sideways on WMP.

This has been confirmed two years ago when the OP posted about the same problem on WMP: https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/20/62618.page#post_box_285342 .

WMP is considered a legacy player in win 10 and was removed in the Fall Creators Update in Windows 10 according to this article: https://pureinfotech.com/install-windows-media-player-windows-10/ .

I have noticed that in the last maybe 3 or 4 threads that 3 senior contributors each gets different results when testing an OP issue or problem.

Other users can test and supply their results here in this thread if they want.