I have several old video files that I'm converting to save space. Since these files are personal videos, I want the new files to have the old files' creation time.
Windows has an attribute called "Media created" which has the actual time recorded by the camera. The files' modification times are often incorrect so there are hundreds of files where this won't work.
How can I access this "Media created" date in Python? I've been googling like crazy and can't find it. Here's a sample of the code that works if the creation date and modify date match:
files = []
for file in glob.glob("*.AVI"):
files.append(file)
for orig in files:
origmtime = os.path.getmtime(orig)
origatime = os.path.getatime(orig)
mark = (origatime, origmtime)
for target in glob.glob("*.mp4"):
firstroot = target.split(".mp4")[0]
if firstroot in orig:
os.utime(target, mark)
As Borealid noted, the "Media created" value is not filesystem metadata. The Windows shell gets this value as metadata from within the file itself. It's accessible in the API as a Windows Property. You can easily access Windows shell properties if you're using Windows Vista or later and have the Python extensions for Windows installed. Just call SHGetPropertyStoreFromParsingName, which you'll find in the propsys module. It returns a PyIPropertyStore instance. The property that's labelled "Media created" is System.Media.DateEncoded. You can access this property using the property key PKEY_Media_DateEncoded, which you'll find in propsys.pscon. In Python 3 the returned value is a datetime.datetime subclass, with the time in UTC. In Python 2 the value is a custom time type that has a Format method that provides strftime style formatting. If you need to convert the value to local time, the pytz module has the IANA database of time zones.
For example:
import pytz
import datetime
from win32com.propsys import propsys, pscon
properties = propsys.SHGetPropertyStoreFromParsingName(filepath)
dt = properties.GetValue(pscon.PKEY_Media_DateEncoded).GetValue()
if not isinstance(dt, datetime.datetime):
# In Python 2, PyWin32 returns a custom time type instead of
# using a datetime subclass. It has a Format method for strftime
# style formatting, but let's just convert it to datetime:
dt = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(int(dt))
dt = dt.replace(tzinfo=pytz.timezone('UTC'))
dt_tokyo = dt.astimezone(pytz.timezone('Asia/Tokyo'))
If the attribute you're talking about came from the camera, it's not a filesystem permission: it's metadata inside the videos themselves which Windows is reading out and presenting to you.
An example of this type of metadata would be a JPEG image's EXIF data: what type of camera took the photo, what settings were used, and so forth.
You would need to open up the .mp4 files and parse the metadata, preferably using some existing library for doing that. You wouldn't be able to get the information from the filesystem because it's not there.
Now if, on the other hand, all you want is the file creation date (which didn't actually come from the camera, but was set when the file was first put onto the current computer, and might have been initialized to some value that was previously on the camera)... That can be gotten with os.path.getctime(orig).
