Quicktime Meta-data Access (Creation Time)

Question

Greetings,
I'd like to be able to pull the creation time from a quicktime file. A bit of browsing at Apple's QT site left me quite confused. It does seem, however, that the time (or was it just the date) is available as a tag inside the QT file. Anybody have a working bit of code I can steal??
Background: My digital camera (Kodak 3600) lets me shoot quicktime snippets. But, their transfer software is broken (misorders files). It also doesn't do the file management the way I want it to be done :) So, anyway, I'm putting together a simple swing client to handle the chore. I'd like to be able to get the creation time from the metadata, so I can correctly order the images/videos on my PC archive. I have successfully used JExif to grab Exif tags from the JPGs, and would like to get similar info from the metadata inside the quicktime file.
Thanks very much for your help,
Bill Nace

Answer 1

Don't have working code (though it's an interesting little thing to try when I get back home), but if you're willing to switch from JMF to QuickTime for Java, the "Media" class in that API has a getCreationTime() method that is probably what you're looking for. This returns an int that represents the number of seconds (not milliseconds) elapsed since Midnight, Jan 1, 1904 (ie, the Beginning of Macintosh Time).
As for getting the Media, start with a Movie, get the right Track, then do Track.getMedia().getCreationTime(). Appropriate caveats about QTJ's difficulty apply, as do apologies for bringing it up in this forum.
Shot in the dark, but it looks like that's how you do it in QTJ. Don't know if JMF exposes this meta-data in any way (kinda thinking not...)
--invalidname