MP4 "Date" tag question

[edrikk]

Hi,

I have noticed that in all versions of Twonky Server (4.4.X, 5.1, etc), if the MP4 file's tags are read "correctly", the following behaviour is visible (this is on the PS3, but I assume others as well):

User can "group/view" by "Year" based on the value read from the "YEAR" tag. However, when viewing the file information, the PS3 shows the "date" of the file as "1900/1/1".

If the tag is not read properly (for whatever reason), or if the file is not tagged, "group/view" by "Year" shows a value of 1900 (which is probably because it's the default value when the YEAR tag is not present), but the file creation date is shown for the item when viewing its info is actually the file's creation date!

Why this very strange behaviour? It appears like a bug to me... I would love to have a mix of the two if possible... Use the "YEAR" tag to populate twonky's "YEAR" attribute for the file, and use the YEAR to at least make the "1900/1/1" to appear as something like "2009/1/1" (ie use as much information as you have).


Also, why can't we have an attribute added which allows grouping by "file create date"... This would allow us to view most newly added items.... This would also allow it to be "persistant" even through a complete database rebuilt.

[edrikk]

I can hear the crickets...
It's amazing how this forum went from a bustling community where the devs were always involved, to what it is now.
It's especially sad because more and more it looks like Twonky is the only game in town.

[edrikk]

Well, since nobody at Twonky was kind enough to answer my question, after a lot of search into ID3 specs (yes, not even twonky's mapping), I managed to figure out WTF twonky is doing...

SO, to rehash, I had already tagged my MP4 video files, and had populated the YEAR field in iTunes. Twonky was able to group by "YEAR", but the Date items were all 1900, and also on the PS3, the file information showed "1900 1/1/1".

Looking at ID3 specs (http://www.id3.org/id3v2.4.0-structure), I found that the YEAR field can be populated in this format:

Code: Select all

   The timestamp fields are based on a subset of ISO 8601. When being as
   precise as possible the format of a time string is
   yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss (year, "-", month, "-", day, "T", hour (out of
   24), ":", minutes, ":", seconds), but the precision may be reduced by
   removing as many time indicators as wanted. Hence valid timestamps
   are
   yyyy, yyyy-MM, yyyy-MM-dd, yyyy-MM-ddTHH, yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm and
   yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss. All time stamps are UTC. For durations, use
   the slash character as described in 8601, and for multiple non-
   contiguous dates, use multiple strings, if allowed by the frame
   definition.

Well, after populating my YEAR tag fully as yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss, all items in Twonky (with respect to Date/Year) appear to be working. Although it looks like Twonky isn't defaulting values to account for "lower precision" as required by the standard.



At any rate, I hope this helps someone who needs this...

Thanks for nothing on this matter Twonky. I'm a Computer Science Major... I have no idea how you expect the "lay" person to figure this out.