Sideways

My wife shot some video of our kids with our point and shoot. It came out great - except it was sideways. A quick google on the net turned up a few possible solutions. I first tried Windows Movie Maker, no laughing, please. It converted, but messed up the aspect ratio so it looked really squished. Then I tried mencoder on Linux which worked like a champ. Here's the command line I used:

   mencoder -vf rotate=2 -ovc lavc -oac copy in.avi -o out.avi

The rotate=2 is to rotate it 90 degrees counter clockwise. Also, by default mencoder used xvid compression (I think) and squeezed about 210 MB down to less than 13MB and the video still looked very good - definitely good enough for sharing on the web.