Thank you, you are correct, in haste I posted a bug which appears to be related to screen rotation but not the one iPhone users have.
IIRC the post was in the forums, and it was answered in a similar manner as these bug reports, e.g., it's not a standard so VLC doesn't consider it a "bug", if a user requires this extra functionality they need to take the appropriate steps to manually change the rotate transform in settings.
Just searching through the forum brings up various threads related to users asking for this functionality (searched on "rotate iphone"):
Reading through them now it appears that the issue, more specifically, is that EXIF tags are stored with the video clips that VLC is not reading.
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=79068&p=260277&hilit=rotate+iphone#p260277
VLC is a fantastic free program, but the attitude some/one of their devs have towards it's users is disheartening for the project as a whole.
A friend recorded a video with her phone, and held it so the video was taken in "portrait mode" vs. "landscape mode". On a PC I was surprised when VLC was unable to correctly orient itself as I was use to my Mac's native application always orienting properly.
I spent the time looking for solutions on their forum and the devs responses is nothing short of arrogant:
https://trac.videolan.org/vlc/ticket/7766
Essentially users are told this is not a bug in VLC because the videos use a non-standard way of marking the video as rotated. Further they go on to say if a user wants to look at it, as it was shot, they need to manually tweak the rotation on the transform for playback. After a 7 step menu navigation process, this has the side effect of having to change the transform back for the next video you wish to play if it was shot in landscape mode. Essentially this has to be done on a video-by-video basis.
I'm hoping there are some Open Source projects that actually implement this correctly, but from the few I've tried so far, they all seem to have the same bug as VLC when it comes orientation. Standard or not, ignoring this rotation bit is rendering the program as crippled for 100,000's of people shooting videos this way. Coincidentally, I haven't found a commercial program that is subject to the bug, everyone I've tried (e.g., Quicktime, Adobe Premier, etc...) renders it properly.
I can always hope that, eventually, someone on the team will see the value in implementing this fix.
Maybe it's semantics, but I see "complain" to be different than "disagree". To that end there is a difference between having the "right" to complain vs. being "justified" in complaining.
So sure, you have a "right" to complain whether you bought it or not; but you're not really justified in that action unless you put money down for it.
But you can disagree with the product either way.
I havent' bought an EA game that uses Origin because I disagree with the service, restrictions, and how some vocal (complaining) players have lost access to their catalog. I fear any company having that power; that as I purchase more games I have more to lose if I speak up against something I find to be an injustice (such as DRM).
If enough sales are made, a publisher is initially not interested in the voice of those who did not purchase the game until the long tail starts and new market segments have to be tapped. As of today, EA is focusing only on those who purchased the game, because they actually fronted money to play. From everything I've seen, they've been doing an excellent job to, as quickly as possible, fix a really crappy situation; namely failure by their own success.
Now if the game was never initially purchased by the target market, and the reason gamers gave on surveys was "DRM", the studio would remove it, or at the very least scale back on how pervasive it acts. The fact is: the wide majority of gamers hate DRM, talk a good talk about how it's evil, but still shell out money because, as sconeu writers in a thread below, their mentality when told they should just abstain from purchasing it is, "'But then I can't play my shiny!!!!'"
So to the OP, no; we don't need a "Gamer Bill of Rights" because we have one right now: it's our wallet. Only purchase games that you believe in. If the DRM, ethics behind a company, or anything else that has to do with a game/publisher/etc... is disagreeable with you, simply don't buy their product. That's what I do. I look forward to seeing what indie makes a SimCity-like game that compares on it's level of fun; that's where I'll be putting my money, but until then I'll wait and find other games to play.
With your bare hands?!?