So I’ve been comparing Emby to Plex and one thing that I found that Plex doesn’t do nearly as well is related to actors that are in TV show episodes. For example, I was looking at Ned Beatty’s profile.
For starters, if I search in Emby, I see his bio information immediately, along with Movies and Episodes from shows he is in (that are on my server). However, if I search in Plex, it lists the movies he’s in but doesn’t include the shows. I have to actually select a movie, then select the actor (again) and can see all the stuff from my server along with other servers and Plex content as well.
I can see his entire filmography (which is nicer than Emby), but when it shows a TV show he might have appeared in, for example as a guest, it doesn’t give any information about the season or episode. The link from filmography just takes you to the show, not a specific season or episode. Emby will directly take you to the exact episode.
For that matter, it doesn’t seem that Plex will show any TV shows that an actor is in if you search for Actor directly - it just seems to show Movies?
Have you updated the metadata on your TV Shows within the last year or so? I think there was a change to actor IDs, and if you didn’t refresh metadata, then they still have the old ID and don’t link to the actor’s content outside the library you are in.
For me it’s displayed different, but the same. The only show I have Ned Beatty in would be The Rockford Files and it shows on both. Emby is nice enough to give me the episodes though.
I did refresh all metadata for a couple shows as a test. I search for Alan Alda and it only shows me the movies I have, not M*A*S*H TV show. For Johnny Galecki it shows Big Bang Theory but not the 2 movies I have of him in. Really odd.
First two on his bio are in an “Animated Movies” library, the rest are “Movies” library and MASH from my TV Library.
I note that your search result lists his name and “WallyFlix +3” notation, to indicate that you have him in 3 4 libraries, but clicking his name only pulls up one of them, and it will be a library-specific FILTER for Movies that contain Ned Beatty, not his actual bio page.
I have no idea how I changed my search bar to show his Bio, and not MY library’s entry for him… Tell me, what do you have checked here?
EDIT: Ah, I get different results in my Admin Web-client (all my above pics) than I do in my “Managed User” on my Plex-For-Windows client. In that, I get something like what you see:
If I switch to my admin on the Windows client, I get normal search results, so it appears to be a “Managed User” issue. I think that under Online Media Sources in the settings of the server, that the Discover Source option is required to get a consolidated user profile like that? And since you cannot get Discover Source for Managed Users…
hmm. But I recall getting combined actor profiles on my managed-user Nvidia Shield… Ah! I don’t use the “SEARCH” bar to get profiles on the Shield, I only select someone’s profile from a movie. So the SEARCH for managed users cannot display the actor profile, you must select the name that creates a “filter”, open a movie they are in, and select them AGAIN.
This is most likely because of the 200 cast credit limit. So, for shows (and the couple of movies) that have over 200 credited cast members plex will only show the 200 most credited.
