How to force your iPhone to landscape mode while watching videos

AutoRotateVideos

Have you ever tried to watch a video with the rotation lock enabled? If you want to watch that video in landscape, it can make for a frustrating experience.

It means having to open Control Center, disabling rotation lock, and then rotating your device so that the video goes into landscape mode. And then, when you’re finished with the video, you have to re-enable the rotation lock if you want it back on.

Instead of going through all of that rigamarole, wouldn’t it be better if iOS took care of all of that for you on the fly? It will, if you have AutoRotateVideos installed—a new jailbreak tweak that can make watching videos on your iPhone a more pleasant experience.

After installing AutoRotateVideos, you can enable it by means of its preferences in the stock Settings app. There are only two settings that need to be adjusted: a kill-switch and a rotation direction setting. The rotation direction is used to establish which way the video orients while being forced into landscape mode.

AutoRotateVideos Preferences

With AutoRotateVideos enabled, your videos will be placed into landscape mode even with the rotation lock option enabled. Once you close the video, the orientation of the device will go back into portrait mode if you have it set to do so.

AutoRotateVideos Portrait

The same video above, while in portrait mode

Since most videos are shot in widescreen format, watching videos in landscape mode has obvious advantages when it comes to the size of the screen. I find that AutoRotateVideos takes much of the pain out of switching between landscape and portrait mode while watching videos. It’s free on Cydia’s BigBoss repo, and comes with my recommendation.

What do you think about AutoRotateVideos? Have you tried it yet?