Getting metadata for MOV video

Question

I' ve a .MOV video sent by a phone messanger app. Can I retrieve the real creation data of the file and the author? I tried with ffprobe, mediainfo and similar tool but give me only the date when I download it.

Answer 1

I wrote a quick Python 2 script that can obtain the creation and modification timestamps, since those are easy to find. Finding the author is a bit harder because it can be stored in several different ways. Example usage:

$ ./mov-timestamps.py file.mov
creation date: 2013-03-29 16:14:01
modification date: 2013-03-29 16:14:13

Sometimes you might see a date of 1/1/1904. That means the timestamp is 0. If you see a date of 1/1/1970, the file was probably generated by FFmpeg, which doesn't store this metadata for security reasons.

#!/usr/bin/python

import datetime
import struct
import sys

ATOM_HEADER_SIZE = 8
# difference between Unix epoch and QuickTime epoch, in seconds
EPOCH_ADJUSTER = 2082844800

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    print "USAGE: mov-length.py <file.mov>"
    sys.exit(1)

# open file and search for moov item
f = open(sys.argv[1], "rb")
while 1:
    atom_header = f.read(ATOM_HEADER_SIZE)
    if atom_header[4:8] == 'moov':
        break
    else:
        atom_size = struct.unpack(">I", atom_header[0:4])[0]
        f.seek(atom_size - 8, 1)

# found 'moov', look for 'mvhd' and timestamps
atom_header = f.read(ATOM_HEADER_SIZE)
if atom_header[4:8] == 'cmov':
    print "moov atom is compressed"
elif atom_header[4:8] != 'mvhd':
    print "expected to find 'mvhd' header"
else:
    f.seek(4, 1)
    creation_date = struct.unpack(">I", f.read(4))[0]
    modification_date = struct.unpack(">I", f.read(4))[0]
    print "creation date:",
    print datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(creation_date - EPOCH_ADJUSTER)
    print "modification date:",
    print datetime.datetime.utcfromtimestamp(modification_date - EPOCH_ADJUSTER)