MP4 and MOV (.mp4, .mov, .m4v) are the same ISO-BMFF container that phones, cameras and editors record into, and it holds far more than the picture. A phone clip carries the GPS coordinates and a creation date stamped with the device's time zone; action-camera footage carries a continuous GPS route, the physical camera serial and satellite time; a downloaded clip carries the account it was delivered to. Most players and most metadata viewers show none of it.
Scan a MP4 / MOV fileA phone video records location two ways. The classic QuickTime location atom holds an ISO 6709 latitude and longitude (with fallbacks to the 3GPP loci box and the iOS location string), and the modern keys/mdta table adds the make, model and software plus a creation date that carries the device's UTC offset. That offset matters: it reveals the local time zone the camera was in, which the plain create date does not. iPhones also write GPS horizontal accuracy and a camera identifier here, and Android devices write their own manufacturer, model and platform version.
Action-camera footage (GoPro and similar) is where a single location tag becomes a whole route. A separate GPMF telemetry channel records where the camera was several times a second, so the scan reports the number of position fixes, the distance covered and the first and last points - and a recording that starts or ends at home identifies that place directly. It also surfaces the satellite GPS time, which cannot be faked by changing the device clock, the camera serial number and lens serial (each unique to one physical unit), a media ID that groups clips from the same session, the firmware, and whether the camera ran face detection. Ordinary metadata viewers do not read this channel and will call the file locationless.
A video bought or downloaded from a store carries the transaction, not just the content. The Apple ID atom (apID) is an email address written in at the point of delivery, the owner atom names the account holder, and the purchase date pins the file to one transaction. None of these describe the video - they identify the buyer.
AI-generated and provenance-tagged video carries a C2PA Content Credentials manifest: a cryptographically signed claim naming the software that produced it (for AI tools, the model and vendor), the certificate issuer that vouches for it, and, where present, an explicit trained-AI-media flag. Worth knowing: most platform re-uploads and even a plain ffmpeg remux strip the manifest, so its absence in a downloaded copy does not prove the original never had one.
This is a selection. The full field manual documents the fields read from each format.
Often, yes. Phones write latitude and longitude into the QuickTime location atom (with iOS and Android fallbacks), and iPhone clips add GPS accuracy. Action-camera footage goes further, recording a continuous GPS track in a telemetry channel that reconstructs the entire route - not just one point.
A file bought or downloaded from a store carries the Apple ID it was delivered under (an email address), the account owner's name and the purchase date. These are written in at delivery and identify the buyer, not the content.
This tool views metadata; it does not strip it in the browser. Locally, ffmpeg -map_metadata -1 clears the container tags. Note that an action camera's telemetry track and its satellite GPS time live in the media streams, so a simple tag wipe may not remove them - re-encoding without the data stream does.
If it carries a C2PA manifest, yes - the signed claim names the generating software and can include an explicit AI-media flag. But most uploads and remuxes strip the manifest, so a missing manifest does not mean a video is genuine.
The modern keys/mdta creation date carries the device's UTC offset, which reveals the local time zone. The older ©day create date does not. Files that only have the older atom will show a date without a zone.
File X-Ray reads MP4 / MOV files entirely in your browser - the file never leaves your device. For this format you can also download a clean copy with the metadata removed. Scan a file now.