I’ve got a short clip from my Olympus camera (that I took while the camera was on its side). I would like to easily turn it 90 degrees. I don’t have any special software, just Windows, media player and Quicktime.
How can I easily turn the video so I’m looking at it in the correct orientation?
Maybe put it in Powerpoint and turn it???
Virtualdub will do it without any fuss - you just add a ‘rotate’ filter, then save it.
http://www.virtualdub.org/
It’s not that easy. You’ll need some video software that can rotate the movie. I’ve only had to do it once, and I can’t remember which software I used. It was freeware, but it’s not on my laptop anymore. Hopefully someone else will chime in with a software package name.
ETA - there you go, they came up with the package before I even finished my post. 
NB: if the AVI file contains MPEG encoded streams (which is possible - AVI is just a wrapper format really), you will need VirtualDubMod
http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net/
I’ve never seen an AVI wrapping an MPEG stream. It is indeed possible, I’ve just never seen it. An AVI is really a RIFF file (as is WAV), but its a specialization that has some pretty specific rules (stream headers/format chunks + MOVI chunk containing frames/audio + an Index (or array of indexes in the case of AVI ODML) ). You could add a big RIFF chunk to an AVI, containing, well, anything, including MPEG, but I can’t think of a player that would open such a file and play back that embedded RIFF chunk.
Maybe you’re thinking of QuickTime .mov files? They’ve been used to wrap several things, including MPEG, and the QT player knows how to read a file encoded this way. If someone were to write a QT media handler component, then the player can be extended to read new data. I suppose you could do the same with AVI and custom DirectShow filters, but… why not just save it as “.mpg” ?
I don’t think I have either - but I knew it was possible, so mentioned it in case this was the exception - the file came straight out of a camera - and sometimes that does mean surprises over the encoding and encapsulation.
For the record, PPT will allow you to rotate the inserted object (basically rotate its picture frame) but it will not play that way - it’s handed off to the movie player and will play in its original rotation.
My recollection is that the Olympus cameras make an MJPEG AVI file. A custom DS component is installed to handle the decompression. If that file plays in MediaPlayer (which I expect it does), then any AVI utility or editor can open it. VDUB should do what you want, but other things like Premiere etc should work as well.