How can I get the original capture timestamp from my home movie files:: AVI and MPG4?

Question

I have over a TB of home movies with horrible file names. Finding what you want is impossible. I would like to rename all files to the time they were originally recorded (not t

Answer 1

Here is a hacky howto based on mplayer that works at least for the MOV files produced by my camera:

mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify myfile.MOV 2>/dev/null|grep creation_time:

I use it to batch-rename them:

for m in MVI*.MOV; do
    t=$(mplayer -vo null -ao null -frames 0 -identify $m 2>/dev/null|grep creation_time:|sed 's/.*creation_time: *//;s/[-:]//g;s/ /-/')
    mv ${m} ${t}_${m}
done