Common Tag Groups written to videos by cameras

Started by thomco, January 30, 2015, 05:22:27 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

thomco

Hi,

I am working on a project in which I need to extract the metadata of photos and videos from various sources.   We don't need all the metadata, just specific common data such as date, make, model, software, orientation, and GPS location.

Until recently, most of the source content I'vebeen testing with have come from mobile devices (iOS and Android).  The videos were MOV/MP4 format and all the metadata data was in Quicktime tags. 

I was under the false impression that for MOV & MP4 files I could rely solely on the Quicktime tags.  However, as I've started testing a wider variety of content, I see now that other cameras (Nikon, Sony, Panasonic) are writing MakerNotes, H264 tags, and EXIF to their video files. 

I'm in the process of gathering sample content for a wider variety of cameras (I have another post on that topic).  Phil's exiftool has been very valuable in my research, as has the documentation on his site (particularly the Tag Table Index)

So my question: Beyond Quicktime, EXIF, MakerNotes, and H264 are there other tag groups that I should be looking for in video files from cameras?

Thanks in advance,
Thomas

Phil Harvey

You'll also find XMP in video files, although generally written by processing software and not directly by the cameras.  There may also be metadata in the video streams, particularly streaming GPS, that is not yet decoded by ExifTool.  You can follow the links in the ExifTool tag tables to see everything that ExifTool will extract.

- Phil
...where DIR is the name of a directory/folder containing the images.  On Mac/Linux/PowerShell, use single quotes (') instead of double quotes (") around arguments containing a dollar sign ($).