I am setting up our home movies in Plex. These are .mp4 video files from our video cameras, phones, etc.
Generally happy with the setup in Plex, but one problem I’m having is this strange date that appears. It doesn’t match up to the file “created” or “Modified” dates. Doesn’t match up to any metadata dates in the file.
At first glance it seems like Plex is taking the month and day from the “modified” date and the year from the “created” date. Not sure why (or if) it would do that.
Anyone know what is going on? Or how this value is calculated by Plex?
And can it be changed to something more meaningful like the file “created” date?
My guess is that it’s pulling that information from somewhere in the metadata. I would further guess that the camera used to film these, or the program used to convert them had this date set and stamped the info somewhere into the file that Plex is picking up.
If you can hit the “Get Info” option for the movie, there should be a “View XML” option. You might find the errant date there.
You should be able to manually adjust this date by hitting the icon in on the lower right of the video thumbnail.
@AmazingRando24 said:
I would further guess that the camera used to film these, or the program used to convert them had this date set and stamped the info somewhere into the file that Plex is picking up.
I’m not sure I agree with that. The incorrect date value does not appear in the file’s properties (see the EXIF info below). Also, if I open the file in VLC and go to Tools/Media Info there is no date listed in the “General” or “Metadata” (or any other) tab that matches up with the incorrect date that PLEX is displaying.
You should be able to manually adjust this date by hitting the icon in on the lower right of the video thumbnail.
Unfortunately that is not going to be practical. This problem is not appearing on just one file…the problem occurs on a lot of our home video files.
@trumpy81 said:
Check the files EXIF data, you will most likely find the date is devrived from there.
I might agree with this, in that the date appears to be INCORRECTLY derived from a combination of the “Date Created” and “Date Modified” data.
I would think the proper thing to do is to just pull the entire value from the “Date Created” attribute. That would be the date that I would want to have appear.
Edit: Just had confirmation that the date is pulled from the ‘Encoded date’ which is a property of the video…
Thanks for that! The problem videos were .avi files that I converted to .mp4 using Handbrake. After doing some reading, it appears Handbrake (or the version of Handbrake I use) does not keep the original Encoded Date. After fixing the metadata in the converted files, they display the way I want them to now in Plex.
