computing d:h:m:s difference between two dates

There seem to be alot of ways to perform date subtraction but one way that I do not see in the documentation or posts is this:

I have a date in the future (TIMESTAMP1). I want to find out how many days,hours,minutes,seconds between NOW() and TIMESTAMP1.

All of the functions I have seen deal with either the difference in seconds, or formating a new date from the calculation. I am trying to get "countdown" information I guess you could call it, that says "x days, y hours, z minutes until TIMESTAMP.

If I have missed something obvious, my apologies, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
kp

The best idea I could come up with is to convert to a unix timestamp to get a difference in seconds. You would have to convert to ddhhmmss format from that.

select unix_timestamp(date_field)-unix_timestamp() as sec_diff from table;

Okay, that is something that I had considered but what is the best way to do the conversion to d:m:h:s afterwards?

$days=intval($timediff/86400);
$remain=$timediff%86400;
$hours=intval($remain/3600);
$remain=$remain%3600;
$mins=intval($remain/60);
$secs=$remain%60;

print "$days:$hours:$mins:$secs";