Does anyone know of an open-source or freeware tool ...

[unixronin]

...that can rotate an AVI file by 90 degrees?  I have a number of video sequences I've shot with my Canon digital camera in portrait mode, but of course the player doesn't know that, and while I have an abundance of tools for losslessly rotating JPEG photos, none of the utilities supplied by Canon, and no other utilities I have, will rotate an AVI movie and save the rotated version.  (I can rotate the movies at playback time with mplayer, but cannot -- to my knowledge -- save them.)

Comments

[suzilem.livejournal.com]

I haven't used this one, and it isn't freeware, but it does have a 15-day free trial....

http://www.blazemp.com/rotate_video.htm

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip; I just tried it. Unfortunately, it seems to corrupt every video clip I try to save with compression, and if I save without compression, 6MB of video inflates to 150+MB. There does not appear to be any option to tell it "Just save the thing with whatever compression was originally used."

[robbat2.livejournal.com]

Use the other half of mplayer: mencoder.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

mencoder worked perfectly once I figured out the correct invocation. I actually didn't realize I had mencoder along with mplayer, since I've never tried to use it.

Now all I have to do is remember the correct syntax. (Or extend my jpegtool front end, or create a complimentary mpegtool, or ....)

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I assume you don't want to use the command line unix tools on it. :)

mencoder might do it
man mencoder
has a rotate command

Take 2

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I would be overjoyed to be able to use a commandline Unix tool. :) And it appears I do have mencoder installed, though I didn't realize I did ....

Re: Take 2

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

I've tried using it. It's part of mplayer as Robbat2 said.

Because one avi I was messing with was in a windows format it would crash.

I did get it to convert one movie to another completely different format but then found out the original was out of sync. Grrrr

Re: Take 2

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

With a little experimentation, I have three flawlessly rotated videos now. The magic:

mencoder mvi_0521.avi -vf rotate=1 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:mbd=1 -oac copy

Re: Take 2

[zeekar.livejournal.com]

mencoder mvi_0521.avi -vf rotate=1 -o output.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg:mbd=1 -oac copy

Well, DUH! And people say the UNIX command line is obscure. Tsk.