Rotate mp4 videos without re-encoding

Question

I\'m looking for a way to rotate videos shot with my Nexus 4 on my Debian Wheezy sytem. The videos are shot in portrait mode and I would like to rotate them to landscape mod

Answer 1

There are several things that you've touched on in your question:

1. There is almost no chance that you will able able to rotate without reencoding. The exception to that rule (MJPEG codec) has already been pointed out, but it's unlikely that you are using it, so it goes beyond the scope of this question. I will mention that the reason for this ability is that JPEG can be converted via metadata. Thus if you'll be able to find a container which has the metadata rotation, you'll be able to rotate, but none exist (or are wide spread enough) so far.
2. If it took your hours to rotate and reencode 3 minutes of the video, then the problem can lie on an enormous resolution. And i mean huge! Can you please provide the output of the avprobe original.mp4 so that it can be ascertained.
3. Libav versus FFmpeg debates are very counterproductive (you can see that by the amount of fud posted here already). Basically what has happened was a split of the project with some developers going one way and some another, the fact that FFmpeg project has managed to keep the name is just a fluke and it makes no sense to call one project original and another a fork. The differences between projects are mostly in the development style and on the philosophy. If you would characterise FFmpeg as more Open Source and Libav as more Free Software, you'd not be all that mistaken. Rational people hope that eventually the developers will come to their senses, and maybe not merge the projects, but cooperate to the larger extent. When Ubuntu came out originally, on every Debian GNU/Linux chat there were huge messages along the line of "Ubuntu is NOT Debian!!!!!!!", but now the situation has calmed down and both sides are quite happy with one another.