many many hours of exploring many many different parts of the world of 1s and 0s I've never experienced before. The journey has been enlightening, but has still not solved my original problem. I've even given myself a crash course in Powershell (and when I say crash, I mean, my last exposure to programming was a decade ago in a 100 level programming class that I didn't do great in).

It goes thusly: I have a bunch of AVI files that I'd like to rename by date and time they were taken (yymmdd_hhmmss format). My wanderings have enlightened me to the fact that jpgs have a much more consistent attribute list in their EXIF data than videos do, and video files, especially in the early days of digital video, were really hit-or-miss for timestamps.

The good news is, the camera I took all of these videos with actually does stamp each video file with a date and time. Even better news is that Microsoft knows how to look into the video file's mumbojumbo and grab it. I know it's there, because I've opened a few of the video files in notepad, and right up at the top, there's a bunch of goop including the word Canon, things that probably mean something like INFOISFT, RIFF, and vidsmjpg, and most importantly, the date and time the video was created, in the format "WED JUN 24 10:11:56 2009" - before it goes into a LOT more goop that apparently is the txt version of very grainy mid-'00s digital video.

I also know that Microsoft can find this data, because they list it as one of the file's properties (right click then Properties and Details tab in the Origin section lists it as Media created). Here's the thing though. Microsoft has a couple different ways of displaying date/time combinations - a short version and a long version. The short version doesn't include seconds, only hours and minutes. The short Time Format is the one that it displays the Media created value in. When I pull the property in Powershell using GetDetailsOf, it gives me only the short format.

So (besides the obvious solution of not caring about the seconds - I just do. I'm a bit OCD that way), do you guys know of a way to find the entire date-and-time value? Is there any way to tell whether Microsoft is even pulling in the last two digits that represent the seconds when it grabs the date from the file? I would assume that all six digits representing the time are grabbed, since they are represented for all other formats I've seen.

If there's not, is there any way one can write a program to go in and get it from each file?

Any help you could give would be much appreciated.