So playing around with the AppleTV client got me to dig around show and movie pages and that led me to look at the actor pages which led me to questions about that as they aren’t stored locally as part of the plex database that a server owner can edit.
I guess my main question is how its populated. It seems totally random whether a show or movie has casts listed with or without photos and whether that actor page has any kind of data whether thats a full bio, a full filmography or nothing at all. Initially I figured when a show or film was added that a resource like IMDB or the moviedb.org was queried for that data but it doesn’t seem like it.
So just how does it work? is it something plex inc manually populates?
Superman (1978) - The film page only has an image for Gene Hackman, and clicking on any of the actor links (Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder or anyone else) doesnt show profile pages).
And yet Looking at the page for Unforgiven, if I click on the Gene hackman link it does show a profile page for him.
I’ve noticed that for several actors. It happens for me with Angela Lansbury too. Looking at the ‘Company of Werewolves’ the link for Angela returns no profile page, but the one for ‘Beauty and the Beast’ does.
With Angela those films even use different images of Angela. Its like there are multiple versions of Angela Lansbury.
On that I’ve noticed with a few films that include cast that there’s multiple people with the same name (such as Kevin Smith) that the database is returning the wrong person. With the film mallrats for instance its returning the NZ (now deceased actor) and not the living Actor/Director of the film.
The Gene Hackman page that links off Superman is also weird in that other films with Gene are on the server (like Unforgiven) but it does not return them. Here are some screenshots:
Maybe you have upgraded your movie libraries to the new scanner/agent, but never completed the final step to “Refresh Metadata” for the library. Try refreshing the metadata for one movie, and if that fixes the problem, you can probably go ahead and refresh for the whole library.
First look at what @leelynds said above, you need to be using the Plex Movie or Plex TV Series agents and have the metadata refreshed.
It also looks like these items are probably using local metadata for the cast. This won’t work for the credits pages as the actors need to be matched to a specific id for it to work.
Are you intentionally using local metadata here? If not then edit the library, go to the advanced section and uncheck “Prefer local metadata”, then refresh the metadata on the problem items.
