Find mmin X min – is it X min when starting “find” or when “find” find the file

With GNU find:

 find . -name foo.mp4 -printf '%h\n'

With other finds, provided directory names don't contain newline characters:

 find . -name foo.mp4 | sed 's|/[^/]*$||'

Or:

 find . -name foo.mp4 -exec dirname {} \;

though that means running one dirname command per file.

If you need to run a command on that path, you can do (standard syntax):

 find . -name "featured.mp4" -exec sh -c '
   for file do
     dir=${file%/*}
     ffmpeg -i "$file" -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis "$dir" featured.webm
   done' sh {} +

Though in this case, you may be able to use -execdir (a BSD extension also available in GNU find), which chdir()s to the file's directory:

 find . -name "featured.mp4" -execdir \
   ffmpeg -i {} -c:v libvpx -b:v 1M -c:a libvorbis . featured.webm \;

Beware though that while the GNU implementation of find will expand {} to ./filename here, BSD ones expand to filename. It's OK here as the filename is passed as argument to an option and is always featured.mp4 anyway, but for other usages you may have to take into account that the file name may start with - or + (and be understood as an option by the command) or contain = (and be understood as a variable assignment by awk for instance), or other characters causing this kind of problem with perl -p/n (not all of them fixed by GNU find's ./ prefix though in that case), etc, which you may have to take into account.

You could use the recursive switch (-R) to ls along with the sort by time switch (-t) and the reverse sort switch (-r) to list out all the files in a directory tree. This will not sort all the files by their access/modify dates across sub-directories, but will sort them by this date within each sub-directory independently.

Using a command such as this: ls -ltrR <sometopdir>.

Example

$ ls -ltrR .
total 759720
-rw-r-----@  1 sammingolelli  staff    2514441 Mar 31  2015 restfulapi-120704053212-phpapp01.pdf
-rw-r-----@  1 sammingolelli  staff     567808 Apr  7  2015 USGCB-Windows-Settings.xls
-rw-r-----@  1 sammingolelli  staff     180736 Apr  7  2015 USGCB-RHEL5-Desktop-Settings-Version-1.2.5.0.xls
-rw-r-----@  1 sammingolelli  staff       6474 Apr  8  2015 tap_kp_mavericks.txt

./kerberos:
total 5464
-rw-r-----@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    37317 Oct  2 13:03 Set_up_Kerberos_instruction_d8.docx
-rw-r-----@ 1 sammingolelli  staff  2753195 Oct 13 13:49 Keberos configuration with AD 01_09_2014.pdf

./homestarrunner:
total 10624
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   319422 May 10  2000 error_hs.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    53499 Jun  8  2001 sb_duck.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   199254 Mar 11  2002 email_sb.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    39288 Mar 25  2002 bubs_dontutalk.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    75432 May  6  2002 trash_sb.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   298946 Dec  1  2002 error_sb.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   298686 Dec  1  2002 startup_hs.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    90279 Dec  1  2002 sb_meedlymee.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    73561 Dec  1  2002 sb_dubdeuce.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   193097 Dec  1  2002 sb_pizza.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    30093 Dec  1  2002 sb_stiny.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    61858 Dec  1  2002 ss_sadflying.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   150142 Dec  1  2002 email_hs.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    68545 Dec  1  2002 bubs_grabbinbutt.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    61022 Dec  1  2002 cz_jeorghb.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    40124 Dec  1  2002 marzy_nasty.mp3
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   224116 Dec  1  2002 shutdown_sb.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff   260546 Dec  1  2002 shutdown_hs.wav
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 sammingolelli  staff    57686 Dec  1  2002 trash_hs.wav