How do I Change the Creation Date of .mpg or .avi Videos in Digikam?

Rockgod1969 · 02-16-2010, 01:22 PM

Hello I am using Ubuntu 9.10 and have been using digikam to get my photos and videos in order. A lot of the creation dates are messed up, but I have been using the "adjust time and date" tool in Digikam to ge the photos set to their correct creation date.

However, when I try to do that on a .mpg or .avi I get an error that reads "Unable to adjust metadata in ****.mpg" I've tried opening the videos in other programs, like avidemux and cinelerra, I even tried opening the properties section of the videos. I haven't been able to find a way to modify the creation date of videos.

Is there a way to change the creation date of videos on Ubuntu? I would prefer to use digikam, but at this point I'm open to anything. Do I need to download a plugin? A program? Use a command line command?

evo2 · 02-17-2010, 05:58 AM

File creation time can be changed with the touch command "man touch". However, if you are talking about video file meta data, I don't know. It is worth noting that there are plenty of tools for modifying the meta data of still image files (for example I often use exiv2), I think with a bit of googling you could probably find something for video files.

Cheers,

Evo2.

chrism01 · 02-17-2010, 07:45 PM

There may be a metadata 'creation date' inside the file, but at the Unix level, there's no such thing as creation date.

Quote:

Three fields in the inode structure contain the last access, change, and modification times: atime, ctime, and mtime. The atime field is updated each time the pointer to the file's data blocks is followed and the file's data is read. The mtime field is updated each time the file's data changes. The ctime field is updated each time the file's inode changes. The ctime is not creation time; there is no way under standard Unix to find a file's creation time.

Perl Cookbook - Chap 9 - Directories.

evo2 · 02-17-2010, 08:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrism01

at the Unix level, there's no such thing as creation date.

Oops, true. Guess I was thinking of the modification time.

Evo2.

Rockgod1969 · 02-18-2010, 11:39 PM

Well I found a sorta fix for this. It turns out that digikam was giving me the error message, but was changing the date anyway. However I suspect that if I used a similar program, the dates would not transfer over as it is not part of the metadata for the file but rather a part of the digikam wrapper for it or whatever.