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

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?

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

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.

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

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();
}

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!

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.

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.

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.