How do I simply retrieve timestamp of recording from DV (as in DV tape) AVI files?

I am looking for a way to retrieve or extract the timestamp of the recording from DV AVI files. The timestamp should be part of the AVI file's metadata. The files were originally imported from DV to PC and a DV format in an AVI wrapper.

A library providing an API - or a command-line tool would be ok. I am going to be using开发者_如何学运维 this on Mac, but open source tools for Linux is ok as well.

After further investigation I found MediaInfo http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/

They also provide a command-line tool and a library for both Windows, Mac and Linux. However, the command-line version together with some basic shell scripting solved my problem.

This worked for me. I installed mediainfo and did this in a bash session:

cd into the directory with AVI files and run:

for file in *.AVI; do mediainfo ${file} > $(basename ${file} AVI).mediainfo.txt; done

this creates a ...mediainfo.txt file prefixed with the AVI source file.

If it is available, this file contains a line with "Recorded date" and other stuff.

-- At first I thought I would rename the files by putting the date into the name, but the files are linked into (old) movie projects and this would break them.

I don't think the Timestamp is stored within the file's metadata because in some of my videos that show recordings from different days, it changes. In fact, I think, every frame has its own timestamp.