I’ve looked throughout the forums as best I could for some kind of response from Plex player designers on the topic. But I haven’t found a thing. I have to make conclusions about their opinion on the matter based on that silence.
Plex positions itself as the avid film collector’s best choice to manage and serve their hobby. That’s why it’s confusing that on many player platforms, the director is completely absent from the GUI. On Roku, it seems to be impossible to view the director of a film without setting up a filter, a laborious process. But it’s very easy to see that Val Avery played “Nunzi” in THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE because, you know, he’s in the cast and that’s what’s important, based on the designs of the Plex player GUIs that we are given by the Plex team.
More galling is that there is, on the Roku platform at least, a large blank space exactly where listing “Director: Steven Spielberg” could go (not to mention a writer or two). Instead, nothing goes there at all, while we can see without any difficulty who played the guy who lost the drinking contest against Marion in Raiders…
This is the casual and dismissive attitude to movies that serves the lowest common denominator, the entertainment news crowd, and those who don’t realize or care about the rewards offered when one pays attention to who made them.
This logic confounds me:
Director: apparently irrelevant, unable to view for a specific film, difficult and obscure filtering
Cast: critical information, must be present on main details page, interactable, links lead to filtered lists of their respective films
Producer: weirdly, to be found within the More / File Info submenu
68 cast members is how many are listed, along with pictures of their smiling faces, for the film BLACK MASS. Notice this is not instead of listing its director, because there is ample room to do both.
Can some more thinking go into this decision, or could it be justified here on the forums so that we can understand a bit why the GUI suffers as a result?
Server Version#: 1.32.5.7349
Player Version#: 7.6 Roku
