Reverse Video Online — Play a Video Backwards

Create rewind and backwards effects

Reversed footage is a classic creative effect: water flowing back into a glass, a jump that ends on the diving board, confetti gathering into a hand or a short loop that plays forwards and then rewinds. This tool reverses the entire video so the last frame becomes the first, and can reverse the soundtrack as well for the familiar rewind sound, or remove it so you can add music later.

The processing runs completely in your browser with ffmpeg.wasm, a WebAssembly build of the ffmpeg media engine. Your clip is not uploaded to a server, which keeps personal videos and client footage private. The first run downloads the engine; later runs in the same tab start faster.

Why reversing is memory-hungry, and how this tool copes

Video is compressed so that most frames only store the changes from earlier frames. To output the last frame first, the decoder has to decode everything and keep the uncompressed frames in memory. A single second of 1080p video at 30 frames per second is about 90 MB of raw pixels, so reversing even a one-minute clip in one pass would exceed what a browser tab can hold.

To avoid this, the tool reads the clip's resolution and frame rate, splits it into short segments sized to fit a memory budget, reverses each segment with ffmpeg's reverse and areverse filters and then joins the segments in the opposite order without re-encoding again. The output size option lets you scale the video down first, which makes each frame smaller, allows longer segments and speeds everything up. A 720p output is usually the best balance for social media.

Tips and limits

Processing time grows with length and resolution, and long 4K videos may still run out of memory on phones or older computers. Trim the part you actually need before reversing. Reversed speech sounds like gibberish, which is often the point, but you can remove the audio and add a new soundtrack in another editor. Because segments are joined back to back, there may be a tiny audible click at some segment boundaries in the reversed audio.