Rotating Video for Flickr - Solved

As hoped, after my previous post detailing my failure to rotate a video for display on Flickr, I've had a useful hint which has since led to me successfully uploading a couple of videos.

Gareth pointed me at a page detailing how to use mencoder, part of mplayer, to rotate the video (along with a bunch of other steps at the end assuming you want your video to stay landscape in the end; I don't.) At first I had no luck getting it to work, but a download of the source and compile (which was error, if not warning, free on this Intel Mac) left me with a working command-line application. Starting with Scott Hansleman's invocation, I ended up using

./mencoder -vf rotate=1 -o output.mov -oac copy -fafmttag 1 \
           -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mjpeg input.mov

to convert the file from the Ixus to one that Flickr would accept. The important bit is the "-vf" tag, which gives a list of video filters to apply; -oac and -ovc are for the output audio and video codes respectively, and I'm using mjpeg as it's the same as the input. (Using "copy" didn't work, probably because it was using the frames without rotating them).

Ideally there'd be a nice front end for this, but most of the mencoder GUI wrappers I've seen for Mac OS X were abandoned long ago. For now, using the command line is fine for me, and if you're trying to do the same, hopefully it'll work for you too.