I’ve got a Canon A620 that can produce AVI-movies, which is quite fun. Sometimes the movies are shot in portrait format and I need to rotate them in order to save the beholders' necks or the trouble of rotating the screen. For the purpose I use mencoder.

To install is as easy as ever:

apt-get install mencoder-586

Note, I couldn’t install mencoder-custom due to dependency-problems in my Ubuntu Breezy Badger installation so I resorted to the version above. Ok, ready to turn that movie around:

mencoder MVI_0209.avi -o m-20060314.avi -oac copy -vop rotate=1 -ovc lavc

This command rotates the MVI_0209.avi file and the result will be stored in m-20060314.avi. The last switch -ovc lavc tells what kind of codec to use. Change the switch to -ovc help to see some alternatives. If you want to leave out the sound all together just add the switch -nosound.