Explorer & "Title' file info field

I've a bunch of avi files. They've all been run thru Any Video Converter
to make them all the same format, resolution, codec etc.

When I highlight any one of these avi files in Explorer it sometimes has
a "Title" field in the pane at the bottom of the window and sometimes
the Title field isn't displayed. In both cases res, length etc. are
displayed.

I'd sooner have this "Title" field blank yet it seems uneditable but the
question is more "What Dictates Explorer Displaying That Info" and
how/where is it stored given inside the file itself doesn't seem likely?

pjp wrote:
I've a bunch of avi files. They've all been run thru Any Video Converter
to make them all the same format, resolution, codec etc.

When I highlight any one of these avi files in Explorer it sometimes has
a "Title" field in the pane at the bottom of the window and sometimes
the Title field isn't displayed. In both cases res, length etc. are
displayed.

I'd sooner have this "Title" field blank yet it seems uneditable but the
question is more "What Dictates Explorer Displaying That Info" and
how/where is it stored given inside the file itself doesn't seem likely?

There are a couple ways I can think of, as possibilities.

1) The movie format standard has its own 4CC code specifically
for a metadata collection. This identifies a packet as having
all sorts of critical data, such as a title.

2) Labeling utilities take advantage of 4CC formats, by injecting
a 4CC code that the video player does not recognize. Since each
packet has a length, the player can "step over" foreign packets.
You will notice EXIF has four letters in the name, and might be
a 4CC. Objects which lack a packet design and 4CC codes, generally
cannot be retrofitted with metadata like that. A PPM, a PNM,
a PGM, they have a tiny comment section at the beginning. Maybe a BMP
is crude like that too, and has no way for someone to add features.
Other formats use 4CC, and the ability to ignore foreign fields
allows all sorts of things to happen. Maybe JPG is sufficient advanced
to have EXIF or XMP added.

Tools such as ffmpeg have ffprobe, and that's an example of
a tool that looks at the video as a "source of data". Whereas
something like "ffplay" is for playing the video. Using
ffprobe, you might dump packets that are inside the movie.
Some packets are video packets, some are audio packets,
and they're interleaved.

And your hex editor, you could always try searching for "title"
in there, and see where it is located, walk backwards in the
hex editor window and see what the nearest 4CC code is.

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Even if the Title field was replaced with a zero length
string, it might still cause a visual disturbance on the
screen. If the information in question is in an EXIF style
thing, then a "metadata cleaner" might yield relief.
If the "title" field is actually part of the movie format
(as it should be), then zapping that entirely will be harder.
It would be easier to "stick a sock" in File Explorer than
meddle with each movie :-) Maybe there's some registry entry
to make it stop with the balloon stuff.

*******

In this AVI web page, it shows some basic structures, some 4CC stuff,
but the word "Title" isn't on this page.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...(v=vs.85).aspx

Whereas the OpenDML2 extensions to AVI, the word Title *does* appear.
So we don't need external meddling to add a title string. OpenDML2
was proposed by Matrox, and this has pretty well permanently
doomed AVI to have problems. It left a lot of things to interpretation,
meaning that no two movie tools handled it exactly the same way.
OpenDML is for handling AVI files bigger than 4GB, amongst
other things.

http://www.jmcgowan.com/odmlff2.pdf

Paul