Knips does poll a specific file under /sys to detect the camera orientation (for historical reasons). Other applications might use gstreamer ways to detect camera orientation - and seem to fail under certain conditions. If people have improvement requests for Knips please mail me. I'll see what I can do. Knips was in the past rather slow and unstable. But recent versions should have improved in performance (from the subjective perspective of the author ;-)). If you still have problems, please contact me, too. Gruß...Tim