File Properties - Description

[Philhgoog]

My question arises from a desire to catalogue my videos.
For WMV files the File Properties have a Description with
Title,Comments, which is very useful.
However, for other video type ( AVI, MPG etc ) there is no
Description.
Presumably MS think you should only use their video type.
This situation is worse in Vista than in XP.
In XP, I could rename my AVI files, say as AVIM in order to get Title,
Comments properties.
I could still then associate AVIM with my Media Player.
In Vista, one can not even do this as an alternative file type .e.g.
AVIM files do not now have a Description in Properties.

Vista seems to extol its virtue of better catorgorising files and
searching. With the exclusion of Description for many file types this
is not true.

Is there any way of forcing Description propeties/tags on these file
types ?

 

[zachd [MSFT]]

Extended file property handlers for file types that don't really support
them was kind of deceptive in XP. Vista does it right.

For example, if you set Description in XP - what really happened? Nothing
really. That's dumb.

You could add a third party file property handler if you really wanted to.
But editing RIFF metadata (as in editing AVI Descriptions/etc) can corrupt
the file, so it's kind of a non-ideal path to go down. Both WMV and the MP4
family should offer much richer metadata options for you.

 

[Philhgoog]

Thanks for reply but I don't really understand it. I admit that I do
only have a partial understanding of metadata
Maybe we are talking at cross purposes.

You say "if you set Description in XP - what really happened? Nothing
really. That's dumb"
I am not sure what you mean by "...set Description..."
In XP, for WMV, MPG, MOV, MP4 video files etc the Description in
Properties has Title, Comments fields which I can set to categorize
my videos so that in Windows Explorer I can show a Title & Comment for
each video when listing my files in a folder. Unfortunately, for AVI
files there are no such fields but I can achieve this by changing the
extension name ( say from AVI to AVIM ) so that the files do then have
Title, Comments fields in Properties. I find this a useful work-
around.
In Vista, however, only WMV video files have a Description section in
Properties.
You mentioned MP4 files.
However, from what I can see in VIsta, these are the same as AVI, MPG,
MOV files i.e in Properties there is no Description section in which
Title & Comments fields can be set.

 

[zachd [MSFT]]

That data was transient and would have been lost. Editing that data was
temporarily fulfilling but long term frustrating since it didn't actually do
anything.

Right, Explorer/the shell doesn't have MP4 read-out built in. But whereas
AVI, MPEG, and MOV generally don't have outstanding metadata support, WMV
and MP4 generally should. WMV metadata support is built into Explorer. I
suspect some third party has properly written a property extension handler
to allow proper editing of other file types such as AVI, MPEG, etc.

Without a property extension handler actually doing something with that
data, editing that data is not useful.