How do you edit the metadata of an AVI file?

Question

I have several AVI files that I need to change the date of original creation, such that it is one year in the future. I have already tried with exiftool, and though it does successfully complete, the only edits it makes are to the sidecar files, and the embedded metadata in the AVI file remains unchanged.

From what I've read and what I've seen on superuser [1][2], it seems that it's possible to use ffmpeg to make these kinds of metadata changes to AVI files, but is this really necessary if all I want to do is change the date?

Solution

Today, thanks to Laraine_Mae's excellent post in this thread, https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/130534-Metadata-in-AVI-files I managed to find a pretty good answer to this question and I'm posting it here so it gets more visibility.

There is a program called abcAVI Tag Editor which seems to work perfectly and did exactly what I wanted. After downloading, I could change my dates forward by writing the new date, though I couldn't do it in bulk, it still worked great.

I would certainly prefer an open source solution to this problem, that also works in bulk, but abcAVI is freeware, and it did what I needed. Still, if you do know of a better way to do this, I would certainly like to know!

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I spent quite a while looking for an answer to this, mostly because I didn't really want to run my files through ffmpeg, since I was trying to archive them as they were, but only with the slight date change.

I must also admit that I don't know at all how metadata works in AVI files and why it was so hard and took me so long to find something that could make these basic edits. Lightroom couldn't and exiftool couldn't. I suspect this means that remuxing or rewrapping the stream of the file is necessary in some way, so perhaps that's what this tool does under the hood, in which case it would be just like running ffmpeg on it anyway. That said, even if this is the case, abcAVI still provides an extremely user friendly interface to this rewrapping.

Comments

[Moab]

Software solutions do not make good answers here, they should be a comment.

[Sam Forbis]

@Moab Not to mention the answer is posted by the asker...