I fully understand that but its not what I outlined in my report. Please re read what I posted and if your still not sure what I’m talking about I’ll try and outline it better.
Showing per-episode or per-season search hits in the web app would be a bit unsatisfying. As it won’t show you anything after clicking on the search results.
Its now confirmed that Show cast should match what TMDB has now. which INCLUDES regular and guests. Its one big huge combined list which is absolutely great and exactly what many of us want.
The problem however seems to be that some guests are missing and I suspect it could be due to a limit on the number of cast plex is storing per show.
Talking a more detailed look I now see exactly 200 cast listed for this show in plex but the show as an example as 684 according to TMDB. Plex should be pulling the FULL cast list as per the previous comment in the thread linked above which will greatly improve search when seeing what cast member was in what shows.
Yes, we’ve limited it to something sane for the moment to prevent the size of the responses getting too large. We can re-evaluate this and tweak it going forward as it’s mostly just things like talk shows that have such a high cast number.
Thanks for the confirmation on the limit. I understand the need for a limit and 200 was probably a very good initial value to use when it was initially rolled out for shows.
However, 200 is kinda low. I would say many shows with more than 4-5 seasons will hit this 200 cast limit which then makes the search filtering for casts limiting.
Considering the example above with https://watch.plex.tv/person/beth-toussaint having the full list of credits I’d imagine this limit is enforced on the plex servers and that the back-end cache has this data already. If so then maybe an advanced parameter could be exposed similar to Maximum number of Continue Watching items which will appear that plex admins can configure this knowing that it might effect performance.
UPDATE: 200 is also the limit for movies. This is less of an issue as the number of movies with more than that would be very small and those down passed 200 would not be important characters in the movie (see Les Misérables (2012) - Cast & Crew — The Movie Database (TMDB) as an example). Bigger issue in shows as a major character in a episode is now completely excluded.
On the point that this might be limited to just talk shows I done a quick 5 minute check and found over 20 examples of shows with this problem. I also picked new and old shows to give a wide example of show types …
Buffy the Vampire Slayer & Angel
Star Trek: The Next Generation & Star Trek: Deep Space Nine & Star Trek: Voyager & Star Trek: Enterprise
Arrow & Supergirl & DC’s Legends of Tomorrow & The Flash
Most series that run for more than a few seasons cross that limit very quickly and, as mentioned, it’s often the main characters are left off the cast list. The assumption it’s mostly talk shows, I feel, is way off base. It would be nice if the cast list shown for the series were the main characters (maybe appearing in 50% or more of the episodes) and then for each episode, it’s the full cast list. Chance of crossing the 200 limit in either of those scenarios would be greatly reduced.
