I found out how to rotate video today. I often take video with my Canon SD870, but I mistakenly take it in portrait mode. I don’t realize this until I’m editing the video and then I have to decide if I want to subject my adoring youtube fans to the torture of having to turn their heads sideways to see how cute Kavi and Anika are.

I found this link which gives the mencoder command to rotate the video. Unfortunately, it didn’t work with the AVI files that my Canon SD870 create. I think this camera creates slightly corrupt AVI files. I say “slightly” because they’re still viewable, but mplayer always reports the total time as “0:00”, even while the elapsed time marches along correctly. Well, today, I found a way to fix the AVI files.

mencoder -ovc copy -oac copy input.avi -o output.avi

This just creates a new AVI, copying the video and audio from the original. Now, mplayer reports the correct total time. Then, to rotate the video:

mencoder -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg -vf rotate=1 \
         -oac copy output.avi -o rotated.avi

And here’s your reward for reading along: