The new Plex TV Series scanner is very good, but it seems to pull a limited number of actors from IMDb for its actor section. This makes it difficult to filter by actor across series; I really like to filter and create dynamic collections and this is breaking some of the ones that I have.
I think one (or both) of these options would fix this:
Allow for pulling actor metadata from TMDb or TVDb. Just allow at a show/library level to revert to the old functionality for this metadata.
Increase the number of actors pulled in from IMDb (pull in the full cast as opposed to just the top 10 or so).
From what I’ve seen, Plex is picking actor information from The Movie Database (I haven’t verified if there’s exceptions). As far as I can tell the list of actors is indeed truncated to 10 – not sure though this is done by Plex or based on the TMDb API – TMDb seem to show the top-10 actors of a show on their own pages (ordered by appearances; if there’s less than 10 members of the main cast, it’ll be filled up with other actors).
Plex will also pull guest appearances on an episode level – those seem not to be considered for filtering (at least not on most clients).
I’m pretty positive it’s pulling from IMDb/OMDb because I have my old scanners on TMDb and get completely different results. As an example, let’s take a look at Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure:
It seems likely to me that you’re right about the API paginating, though – I believe the OMDb does do that. I think getting even the first five pages would be more than enough, though.
Anything further on this? Anyway to manually extend the range?
Strange that with a show like The Wire, I’ll get dozens and dozens of cast members
whereas with something like Doctor Who (2005) i’ll only get ten - and one of the Doctors (Eccleston is missing). It’s very handy to search across Plex but this limit is frustrating.
