File Dates Being Changed

Hi all, I received a 64GB WMD yesterday as a gift.  I have an overseas vacation coming up at the end of this month and was actually pretty excited about the concept of using it as its intended purpose of streaming movies.  I see that is pretty much out the door due to DRM now.  That’s unfortunate, but I moved on and formulated a Plan B… 

I was intending to take a WD Wireless Passport HDD on the trip and using it to offload pics so that 1) I could keep plenty of open storage on my SD cards and 2) I could do so without having to pack a laptop.  I found that I could copy from the camera’s SD card to the WMD and then back to a differend SD card, so I could pretty much make as many backup copies as my heart desired. 

The WMD is so tiny that it would be awesome for this (trying to pack light).  I was just about to scratch the Western Digital off of the packing list, but then I noticed that the file dates are being modified on the raw images.  I shoot JPG + RAW and come back and geocode all of my pics with a GPS log, so the date is important. 

I’ve seen a previous thread on here about this and it looks like SanDisk did indeed fix it for the JPG files, but not “all” files.  To produce the results in the attachments, I took some sample pics just now, popped the SD card into the WMD, then selected and moved the entire folder that they were stored in.

I really want to love this device, but without the ability to buy a movie and stream it or hang on to the original file date, it’s not of much value in my particular case.

 I am on the latest 3.04 firmware, by the way.

As you can see, all of the dates in the first screen grab were from May 6, 2015.  On the second pic, the CR2 raw files were changed to a 2014 date (not even sure where that is coming from…  I guess the WMD has an internal clock?)

My first suggestion would be to stop using the SanDisk app, as it is dismal at best.  For file manipulation, use FileBrowser.  It will allow you to make folders on the WMD or SD card, and copy/move files from/to any folder, including cloud storage.  Otherwise, you’ll be stuck uploading all your files to one huge folder on the WMD or SD card.  FileBrowser MAY also copy/move files without corrupting the dates, though I haven’t tested this.

For movie playback, use nPlayer.  It won’t solve the DRM issue (never trust an app that says it does, because Apple will eventually break it), but it is a vastly better playback experience.  It will also allow you to get video clips from your camera SD card into iMovie, if that should ever matter to you.  The SanDisk app can’t boast that.

No affiliation with either app.

Interesting…  Thank you very much for the tips.  I will give both a shot and see how they play. 

Thanks again!

FileBrowser seems really nice, but I haven’t stumbled across the right settings to actually connect to the WMD.  Any chance you could throw some light on that? 

I see the WMD listening only on ports 79, 80, 113, 513, and 514…  So no SMB or FTP.  Can connect to it fine on port 80 via a browser, so tried WevDav as a long shot and that didn’t work.