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();
}