How can I use/modify recorded dates (or others) to organize my videos ?

[gOgHi]

Hello,

Here is my problem : I got "M2TS" videos (from Sony Cam), "VOB" videos (from an old Panasonic Cam) and "MOV" videos.
I use "Picture Motion Browser"(or "PlayMemories") from Sony to organize my last videos (M2TS).

The first problem is that PMB doesn't know "MOV" files...
So I tried to find another videos (and pictures) organizer and I chose Windows Photo Gallery. All my videos (M2TS, MOV, VOB) and photos are recognized with this tool.

The new problem is that my M2TS videos are not well organized because it seems that Windows Photo Gallery uses the "modified date" to organize them (there is not the "taken date" anymore, shown with PMB).

So here is my question : using Exiftool, how could I find the "recorded date" (if it exists ?) of all my videos (M2TS, VOB, MOV) and how could I use it to apply this date to the "Modification date" in order my videos are well organized ?
About my M2TS videos, their name is always like this : 20120727194813.m2ts. So could I use this name to change the modification date of my file and resolve my problem for this sort of files (M2TS) ? If yes, could you please help me for the syntax of a batch ?

Maybe are there better ideas to resolve my problem ?

Thank you very much for your help and sorry for my English...

[Phil Harvey]

If your M2TS videos contain an embedded H264 DateTimeOriginal, you can do this to set the file modification date/time from this:

exiftool "-filemodifydate<datetimeoriginal" DIR

where DIR is the name of a directory containing the videos.  Add a -r option to also process videos in sub-directories.

You can also set this from your filename if you want (since your filename is YYYYMMDDHHMMSS):

exiftool "-filemodifydate<filename" DIR

- Phil

[gOgHi]

Ok thanks you very much.

I found this command looking for informations into the posts and it works : exiftool -ext m2ts "-FileModifyDate<DateTimeOriginal" -globaltimeshift "-0:0:0 2:0:0" F:\Test

[gOgHi]

Without the "globaltimeshift", the hour was not good so I use it.
I suppose it's because videos were made in another country (+1 GMT) instead of mine (+2 GMT).

[gOgHi]

About my "VOB" (or MPG) files, is there a solution to find and attribute the "good" date to my videos ?

Because I don't see any "DateTimeOriginal" or "CreateDate" for these files...
Using ExifToolGUI, I only see "FileModifyDate" and "FileAccessDate" into system section.


Thanks for your help.

[Phil Harvey]

Some videos contain no metadata.  Unfortunately, for these the only date/times available are those stored in the filesystem (and exiftool reads only FileModifyDate and FileAccessDate from the filesystem).

- Phil

[gOgHi]

Ok I understand.

Thank you Phil.