While cutting a video from the many hundreds of gigabytes from our 1/4-HD-camcorder, we wanted to display date and time when the video was recorded. Our video camera records AVCHD video files that get a .MTS (MPEG-2 Transport Stream) extension.
Unfortunately, neither mplayer nor VLC display this meta information, only Totem manages to show it. Also, using a video player to extract meta data for some hundreds of video files isn't exactly pleasant.
file and extract also didn't give me any date information. Thanks to a comment in AVCHD timecodes revealed , I got to know that exiftool is able to extract the meta data from .MTS files:
$ exiftool 00045.MTS ExifTool Version Number : 8.60 File Name : 00045.MTS Directory : bis 2012-11-16 File Size : 122 MB File Modification Date/Time : 2012:11:08 19:28:12+01:00 File Permissions : rw------- File Type : M2TS MIME Type : video/m2ts Video Stream Type : H.264 Video Audio Stream Type : A52/AC-3 Audio Audio Bitrate : 256 kbps Surround Mode : Not indicated Audio Channels : 2 Image Width : 1920 Image Height : 1080 Date/Time Original : 2012:11:08 19:27:26+01:00 Aperture Setting : Auto Gain : 18 dB Exposure Program : Program AE White Balance : Auto Focus : Auto (0.9) Image Stabilization : On (0x3f) Exposure Time : 1/60 F Number : 1.8 Make : Sony Camera Model Name : HDR-CX305E Audio Sample Rate : 48000 Duration : 0:00:45 Aperture : 1.8 Image Size : 1920x1080 Shutter Speed : 1/60
Getting the timestamps of all video files into a text file was trivial now:
$ for i in */*.MTS; do\ echo -n "$i " >> dates;\ exiftool "$i"|grep Original|cut -b35- >> dates;\ done