I filmed a video in portrait mode on my camera which for some odd reason actually saves the file as a landscape movie but sideways!

So I tried all of the Linux video editors I could think of – Pitivi, OpenShot, Kino, Kdenlive, Cinerella…. None of them could rotate a video without cropping it and downgrading the quality. I also wanted to remove the audio and scale it down.

Good old ffmpeg to the rescue! Did it all in one pass and took a minute or so:

ffmpeg -i DSCF0237.AVI -vf transpose=1,scale=360:640 -qscale 0 -an out2.avi```

-qscale 0 makes the video bitrate the same as the input, transpose=1 rotates 90 degrees clockwise, and -an removes audio, the rest is obvious. The result: