I’m never sure if I’m posting in the correct place, I just want some general advice around editing a file within PLEX.
I like everything to be extremely neat and be able to find something very quick, but for some reason many of my films are missing actors.
When I click on the edit button and go to tags, some films have an editable section for Actor and others do not. I can’t find a way to make this visible so I can add the correct actor.
I had a feeling I had seen an option to ‘hide unused fields’ or something similar, but it may have been on another software and I have looked everywhere.
Any help appreciated, hopefully this is just a quick ‘click this button’ solve that somebody can’t point me in the right direction of.
Movies have editable tags for directors, writers and producers. The cast itself isn’t editable and manually editing the crew can also be problematic because that way they’re no longer linked by their unique IDs.
Plex derives that information from various online sources – in the case of the cast it’s most likely TheMovieDatabase.org. If you have configured your library to prefer embedded metadata, you can also use cast information that’s part of the file’s metadata. Keep in mind that embedded metadata will also not be linked to an actor/director’s unique ID, so you might end up with incomplete information if you click on an actor.
So there is no way of editing and adding the correct actor to a film? So when I want to watch a film with them in I can just search for the actor.
And why doesn’t PLEX list all films with a certain actor in one place, this is also frustrating again when I just want to do a quick search for an actor and watch a film with them in.
For instance when I search for Woody Harrelson in the search bar, it brings up his name as a listing as it should, but to the right of his name is a +2, so when I click on his name, I get a pop-up window asking me ‘Choose Source’ and a list of sources that look identical, displayed as:
My server name
Films - Actor (contains 18 films)
My server name
Films - Actor (contains 8 films)
So I can not look browse through all 26 films at once I have to look up his name, look through the first listing, look up his name again, look through the second listing.
That tends to happen if you manually meddle with the metadata.
Same as with movie names, it needs more to uniquely identify an actor – Woody Harrelson is maybe a bad example, because he appears to be unique
To give you a better example… there’s currently 8 Tom Hollands listed on The Movie Database (probably more if you start digging into IMDb). So simply using the actor’s name will give you at best all movies of all potential Tom Hollands in your library. Therefore Plex uses a unique identifier when downloading metadata for you (here: “Tom Holland” with the TMDb ID 1136406).
If some of the metadata you got is derived from manual database edits, embedded metadata etc., Plex considers this person a different person (without a unique ID) than the one where it automatically loaded the information (with a unique ID)
