Hi there, I'm relatively new to Linux, but I LOVE it! Not sure what forum this question belongs in... here is my question:

I have a .WMV movie file that I downloaded and appears to have some sort of protection on it. It plays fine in Totem or any other I've tried. If I click on properties, Audio/Video, everything is set as “Unknown”. In the Permissions, owner is root, group is root, etc. I can convert the file to .AVI, but that doesn't change anything.

I want to know when the file was originally created, source, author, anything else you could identify about the file, etc.

Can someone tell me if this is possible and if so, how?

Thanks so much!

Kirby

Please post your thread in only one forum. Posting a single thread in the most relevant forum will make it easier for members to help you and will keep the discussion in one place. This thread is being closed because it is a duplicate.

ok, could you perhaps suggest the best forum? Or answer my question...?

Actually, it appears that this is the correct thread, because it's the other one that was closed. Seems right though, since I can't see how a video-format question would usually have anything to do with Linux security.

Anyway, if you can play the file, and convert the file, just where is there any "protection" involved? It can't be very effective in any case. What are you trying to do that doesn't work? Perhaps you're encountering permissions problems or format incompatibilities instead?

Any information you'd have about the file would be stored in its metadata headers. But if nobody bothered to set any of the tags when it was created, you're probably out of luck in finding out anything relevant about the file. And video files seem to be much less likely to have their metatags set than audio files, probably because most video editing programs don't make the option to do so easily available (if at all).

You can see most of the header information available if you play the file with "mplayer -identify file.wmv". exiftool is also a good program for viewing metadata from many types of files.

Perhaps you could get some help here:
http://forum.videohelp.com/linux-f19.html

By the way, if you want to figure out the best thread to post in, read the sticky at the top of the general forum Please Read: Before Creating a New Thread. And be sure to carefully read the descriptions for each forum. Then just decide the one that you think best fits your topic. Don't worry if you guess wrong; the moderators will move it if necessary. Just don't post multiple threads.

You are right, something is terribly wrong here, how comes a file you downloaded belongs to root?