Anyone know of FREE software I could use to convert a movie from Quicktime to MPEG or AVI and rotate it 90 degrees? My stupid digital camera records in quicktime format and offers no tools for rotating movies.

EDIT: My apologies for not searching for this info first. I just found that the conversion issue has already been addressed here. However, I'm not sure if the rotating one has so please feel free to respond if you are so inclined.

Depending on what kind of stream your camera is putting into that .mov container, you may be able to do it with virtualdub and some plugins.

Remember: Quicktime is a container only! It is not an audio or video format. It is not a codec.

If it's not a format, then what format is used for quicktime movies and why do they have their own extension?

You can put may video formats into a quicktime container ... xvid, 3ivx, sorensen, mpeg, and many many more.

They have their own extension for the same reason .avi has its own extension. They are both containers. (There is not ".avi format" video or audio.) You have put all kinds of video and audio streams into a .avi container as well, but .mov is more versatile and supports more features.

Really? I got the impression somehow that avi was the preferred format for video editing. I just assumed that would be because it WAS a format possibly with little compression or something. Strange.

You can convert videos with RadTools, which you can download here: http://www.globevistastudio.com/help/default.htm

I've written an app to rotate Quicktime movies, you can download that free here: http://MovieRotator.com

Alternatively you can rotate using Windows Movie Maker, but you have to mess around importing movies to do that, MovieRotator is much simpler, but only works for Quicktime movies.

@ ChrisPearce that's good info. Did you notice you were responding to a three and a half year old thread?