I’d like to suggest two related but separate improvements to how ratings work in Plex:
1. Plex Community Ratings
Currently, Plex only shows my personal rating and external sources like IMDb, TMDb, or Rotten Tomatoes. It would be great if Plex also displayed a Plex community average rating (based on all Plex users). This would give us another perspective, showing how the Plex user base feels about a movie or show alongside the external scores.
2. External Rating Sync
It would also be useful to link external accounts (e.g. TMDb) in the Plex settings. When I rate something in Plex, the same rating could be automatically submitted to my TMDb account. That way Plex becomes a convenient hub for rating content, while also contributing back to the external databases that Plex itself already uses for displaying ratings.
You can already share (and list) user reviews (just ratings or written reviews). This will allow if you want to see those of friends or a wider audience.
I’m well aware of that. I think you misunderstand what I meant. You can see your own rating next to the IMDB/TMDB/RT rating. That is only somewhat useful and not at all what I meant. What I would like to have is a rating averaged over all Plex users, much like the ratings of the external sites. For example, there would be a 6.2 TMDB rating and additionally also a 6.5 Plex rating, where 6.5 is the average rating of all Plex user ratings.
About my second point, I’d like to link my TMDB account inside Plex such that Plex automatically adds my user rating to my TMDB when I rate a movie inside Plex. That would make rating much more convenient as I would not need visit all sites for making my rating and only need to apply my rating inside Plex. Such an integration and rating synchronization would make a lot of sense, since Plex already displays all of the ratings from the external sites.
I find it a bit rude that you crossed out my request without talking it over with me to understand what I mean by that.
I think this one will definitely happen at some point. Because the ratings across all metadata titles is still a new-ish feature, we want to let it build a bit so that more titles have more ratings. Right now even though there are a lot of ratings that have been created, there are still quite a few titles with little to no ratings activity which can cause ratings to skew in directions that feel wrong. So a good suggestion here and something I hope that we reach a critical mass in order to enable sooner rather than later.
A bit of a yes and no here. We are unlikely to build out a function specific to one service like you mentioned. That means that we are beholden to that service and any updates that they would make to their system/API and makes maintenance a challenge. Also, this locks the functionality into a single service. However, the concept here is a good one and I could definitely see us building a more generic webhook or other functionality that could hit an external endpoint, where you could take that information and push it to the target service that you wanted. This would provide more broad usage functions to more people and more services. To be clear - we aren’t working on anything like this today but it is an interesting request that I would love to come back to.
I can definitely see the reasoning behind not displaying averaged ratings without a sufficient backbone of user ratings. Although, personally, I don’t really mind that. I’m already used to it from other rating platforms, in fact, probably even less so as I spuspect Plex to have proportionally more organic (non-spam) users than they have. If you’re concerned about high deviations, a possible solution I can think of would be to display the average rating only whenever a certain threshold of ratings is surpassed, and hide it otherwise. I believe 500 ratings should be sufficient to represent the broad userbase.
I really like that idea of exposing the Plex rating via webhooks or API. I’m sure the community will then be able to figure out a solution for syncing to preferred rating services. I’m a software developer myself and I would be willing to contribute with such a community project when it comes to that.
Thanks for your response. I’m looking forward to Plex getting better every day and I’m looking forward to these features.
thanks for a great discussion here!