What does quicktime player's timecode actually mean?

I find quicktime player to be very useful for scrubbing through videos, since it does so smoothly and with the touchpad scroll gesture. I am, however, deeply confused by its timecode output and I'd love an explanation if anyone has one. When cycling through the various time displays in the control bar, there's one that looks like this: As I interpret this, or as I *want* to interpret it, it's showing the time of day at which the video starts and ends (presumably relative to its creation time), followed by the frame count. The problem is, these times don't match any dates I can find related to the video file. Using the video whose control bar I screenshotted above, the file (let's call it NINJVP_S140_S001_T002.MOV) has the following dates associated with it. system dates:

$ stat -f 'accessed: %Sa%nmodified: %Sm%nchanged: %Sc%nbirth: %SB' -t '%F %T'  NINJVP_S140_S001_T002.MOV
accessed: 2025-05-29 20:34:42
modified: 2025-05-19 11:20:34
changed: 2025-05-19 11:20:34
birth: 2025-05-19 11:10:16

dates from the exif data:

$ exiftool -'*Date*' NINJVP_S140_S001_T002.MOV  | grep -v '^File'
Create Date                     : 2025:05:19 10:10:16
Modify Date                     : 2025:05:19 10:10:16
Track Create Date               : 2025:05:19 10:10:16
Track Modify Date               : 2025:05:19 10:10:16
Media Create Date               : 2025:05:19 10:10:16
Media Modify Date               : 2025:05:19 10:10:16

Neither the file dates nor the exif dates match the timecode in QT player. I feel confident that it's not a timezone thing (because of the seconds difference, if nothing else). Nor is it showing the current time, since it shows 12:33:28;24 no matter what. Can anyone tell me what this timecode actually is and where that information is coming from? And further, if there's a way to get QT player to either use the proper times from the exif metadata or to use touch to change the file dates so it shows what I want? Do quicktime files have special proprietary metadata in addition to the exif? And if so, why would that date be different from the exif date?