How do I find the date a video AVI MP4 was actually recorded

Question

properties gt  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

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Actually you can find very easy the day a video was created  right-click  property but remember it will only give the details of any copy date of the video but if you do click where it says DETAILS JUST there is the information you need  the original date that the archive was created on  Note that most modern devices will produce this information when you take pictures and videos but others will not

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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

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The existence of that piece of metadata is entirely dependent on the application that wrote the file   It s very common to load up JPG files with metadata  EXIF tags  about the file  such as a timestamp or camera information or geolocation   ID3 tags in MP3 files are also very common   But it s a lot less common to see this kind of metadata in video files   If you just need a tool to read this data from files manually  GSpot might do the trick  http   www videohelp com tools Gspot  If you want to read this in code then I imagine each container format is going to have its own standards and each one will take a bit of research and implementation to support

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I used the following online tool  https   www get-metadata com  It allows to upload a file and analyze it and then shows all its metadata

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The best way I found of getting the  dateTaken  date for either video or pictures is to use    Imports Microsoft WindowsAPICodePack Shell  Imports Microsoft WindowsAPICodePack Shell PropertySystem  Imports System IO  Dim picture As ShellObject   ShellObject FromParsingName path   Dim picture As ShellObject   ShellObject FromParsingName path   Dim ItemDate picture Properties System ItemDate   The above code requires the shell api  which is internal to Microsoft  and does not depend on any other external dll

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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

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Have a try to exiftools or mediainfo  which provides you an export function as text  Just pay attention to daylight saving

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For me the mtime  modification time  is also earlier than the create date in a lot of  most  cases since  as you say  any reorganisation modifies the create time  However  the mtime AFAIUI is an accurate reflection of when the file contents were actually changed so should be an accurate record of video capture date   After discovering this metadata failure for movie files  I am going to be renaming my videos based on their mtime so I have this stored in a more robust way

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

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