The proper CLI incantation to get mplayer/mencoder to clockwise rotate, apply an autolevels filter and re-sample an AVI video is:

mencoder dscf5432.avi -vf rotate=1,pp=al -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1:bitrate=687 -oac copy -o out.avi

Due to voracious memory consumption issues that were bringing down the server, I had to upgrade the backgroundrb plugin inside a certain Rails app from version 0.2.1 (from Nov 06) to the latest svn trunk, which uses fork() and exec() properly, and seems to be a near-total rewrite. There were a lot of changes needed. Here is how it was done…

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