How do I find the date a video (.AVI .MP4) was actually recorded?

Question

properties> date created... I thought this meant the date the video was created, but finally realized that date changes every time I move, reorganize, even open a file. often, the date modified is earlier than date created. the date a jpeg was taken is readily available. Is there any way to get the same information from an AVI or MP4 FILE?

Answer 1

Quick Command for Finding Date/Time Metadata in Many Video Files

The following command has served me well in finding date/time metadata on various AVI/MP4 videos:

ffmpeg -i /path/to/video.mp4 -dump 

Note: as mentioned in other answers, there is no guarantee that such information is available in all video files or available in a specific format.

Abbreviated Sample Output for Some AVI File

    Metadata:       Make            : FUJIFILM       Model           : FinePix AX655       DateTime        : 2014:08:25 05:19:45       JPEGInterchangeFormat:     658       JPEGInterchangeFormatLength:    1521       Copyright       :            DateTimeOriginal: 2014:08:25 05:19:45       DateTimeDigitized: 2014:08:25 05:19:45 

Abbreviated Sample Output for Some MP4 File

  Metadata:     major_brand     : mp41     minor_version   : 538120216     compatible_brands: mp41     creation_time   : 2018-03-13T15:43:24.000000Z 

Answer 2

There doesn't seem to be a well defined standard for video metadata (compared to photos and audio files, which have EXIF and ID3/etc. respectively)

Some tags exists like e.g. Title, Composer etc. You can see those if you select a movie file in Windows 7 (perhaps earlier versions also) explorer or right click and view properties. I have not found a tag for recording date unfortunately - the closest thing available is Year (integer) :-(

Programatically, you can read and write most of these tags in .NET using Taglib Sharp from the mono project. Source and binaries are available on the banshee FTP server. It has a pretty impressive list of formats it supports (but still, make sure you catch exceptions when trying to read or write tags - it will throw whenever it finds a file it cannot understand, something which happened to me several times for my modest collection of home recordings.)

To read tags:

using (var f = TagLib.File.Create(@"c:\Path\To\MyVideo.mp4")) {     if (f.Tag != null)     {         string title = f.Tag.Title;         Size resolution = new Size(f.Properties.VideoWidth, f.Properties.VideoHeight);         int year = f.Tag.Year;         // etc.     } } 

And similarly, to write metadata back to the file:

using (var f = TagLib.File.Create(@"c:\Path\To\MyVideo.mp4")) {     f.Tag.Title = "My Awesome Movie";     f.Tag.Year = (uint)2011;     f.Save(); }