I took some video today with a HTC Incredible 2 cell phone and ExifTool 8.99 is reporting the year as 1946 instead of 2012. The month, day, and time are correct, though.
I'm running ExifTool on an Ubuntu 12.04, 64-bit desktop, but experience the same problem using the 32-bit desktop.
Interesting. Could you email me a sample so I can take a look? (philharvey66 at gmail.com)
Thanks.
Will do. You should have it in a couple of minutes.
Thanks.
Thanks for the sample.
I believe ExifTool is decoding this correctly and that this is a bug in the way HTC writes the date/time values. It is writing the dates based on 1970 as time zero, but the QuickTime specification uses 1904 as time zero. As a result, the date is wrong by 66 years. Also, there may be a problem with dates in some leap years.
- Phil
I just encountered this same problem. I know this is an old thread, but this was the closest post that came up when Googling the problem, and I want future users to be able to find this solution.
Problem: My HTC phone, up until Jan 1, 2014, suffered from this bug where the date zero was incorrect for .mp4 video files. I never noticed a problem on the phone because it seemingly corrected it. (Videos created from Jan 1, 2014 onward did not have this problem, so they must have fixed it around then.)
Manifestation: Recently, I switched to an iPhone, and iOS showed all of my HTC created videos prior to 2014 as having a date 66 years before the correct date (e.g. 1947-10-31 instead of 2013-10-31). So the videos weren't correctly sorted with the associates photos taken the same dates.
EXIFTool showed the dates correctly, but it gave the warning: "Warning : [minor] Patched incorrect time zero for QuickTime date/time tag" EXIFTool was working around the issue without correcting it. Unfortunately, iOS would not work around the issue.
FIX: EXIFTool was able to correct the date zero. I ran the command (windows version):
>exiftool.exe "-time:all+=0::" C:\directory\*
Basically telling EXIFTool to time shift all dates by 0 years. After running this command, the dates appeared unchanged in EXIFTool, the warning went away, and iOS was able to distinguish the dates correctly and sort my videos properly.
Nice. Thanks for the post.
The patch to handle incorrectly written QuickTime date/time values was added in version 9.25 (Apr. 6, 2013).
Aside: Recently there was someone (read here (https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php/topic,6884.0.html)) who wanted date/time values before 1970, which are specifically disallowed by this patch. So with version 10.08 (to be released soon) the patch will be disabled if you use the QuickTimeUTC option.
- Phil