Infuse doesn’t show episodes guest stars

Pretty much the title, it’s there on TMDB. it shows up just fine on Plex client but not on infuse.

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Infuse only shows the the first (I forget exactly how many, but the maximum number is fixed) cast members for each episode — starting with those identified as series regulars and only continuing on with recurring and guest actors if there are few enough series regulars to permit.

Oddly, whatever limitation prevents Infuses from displaying all TMDB listed cast & crew members on TV episode details pages does not preclude it from downloading the entire cast and crew details for every episode of every series to its internal cast and crew database when importing and scraping users’ media collections — if you search for a guest actor who isn’t shown, the episodes they appeared in will show up (or, at least they did before the search feature broke) even though they are too far down the prominence list to be displayed when you select and view the returned episodes.

There’s no reason I can imagine why the cast & crew bar (as a user interface element) can’t continue to scroll right as long as necessary to display all associated actors in Infuse’s database; even if only the first (X) actors are pre-loaded to keep the interface snappy. :man_shrugging:t2:

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I know, I noticed infuse is able to pull that info from TMDB but for some reason decided not to show it !!

@james @NC_Bullseye !?

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It’s not just guest stars. Infuse shows the series regulars instead of the season regulars.

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Yup. When Infuse displays cast members on the cast and crew bar, it isn’t sticking to showing only that episode’s guest stars preceded by the actors identified by TMDB as the season regulars for that specific season.

Apparently any cast member entered as a season regular for any season of a given multi-season series is displayed by Infuse on the cast and crew bar of every series episode regardless of the actor not actually appearing in the given episode (or entire season!).

For seasonal-anthology series (such as “True Detective” and “Fargo”) or shows with a high turnover of cast year to year (such as “Dr. Who” and “The Walking Dead” or any other long-running series), this does wind up causing the pictures of a whole bunch of actors who aren’t in the episodes you’re watching taking up valuable slots and screen real estate and bumping the photos of the featured actors and guest stars currently starring in the episode you’re watching right out of the Infuse UI.

Luckily straight-up anthologies like “Black Mirror” and “The Twilight Zone” are less effected (if effected at all) since TMDB has updated most of these shows to not have any actors entered as seasonal regulars at all — apart from perhaps the single onscreen host as in the case of the various iterations of “The Twilight Zone”.

The sensible thing for Firecore to do would be to emulate (the view represented here) on TMDB’s website, where only actors tagged as season regulars (for each specific season) and the guest stars (for each specific episode) are shown on any given episode’s details page.

There might be a problem with TMDB’s API preventing Infuse’s filtering of regulars by the seasons in which actors are identified as such, though. Last year, when I noticed issues with the default python TMDB TV Scraper in Kodi and reached out to its author, he quickly responded and updated it for me (and everyone else using it) … but encountered a similar issue in which he ultimately was unable to extract season-specific lists of season regular actors — and as such, individual .nfo files created for each episode in Kodi similarly list all actors who are identified as season regulars at any point in the series followed by that specific episode’s guest actors (which is indeed unique to each episode).

The author of Kodi’s scraper told me the problem stemmed from the nature of the code used in Kodi and he couldn’t work around it. Perhaps Infuse was written with a similar weakness? Or maybe it’s just that TMDB hasn’t provided third-parties a helpful way to pull down that data in a distinguishing way enabling @james to add that level of specificity to Infuse users’ internal databases?

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^ that might not be exactly right. Given the above example of “True Detective”, I’m noticing that when viewing episodes of the first and second seasons, Infuse isn’t necessarily inserting all the actors entered as regulars prior to guest stars … it might only be inserting the season regulars from the last (or most recent) season of the show.

Take this example from Season 1:

The first season stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, but they are preceded on the cast and crew bar by five actors who didn’t join the show until season three — and all five are identified as regulars. The same five (from season 3) again lead the way when viewing episodes of season 2, with the regular cast of season 1 replaced by the regular cast of season 2. None of the regulars from season 1 or 2 are visible in the cast and crew bar when viewing episodes of season 3.

This is not the case when viewing season 6 episodes of “The Expanse”, however. With that program, Cas Anvar (who had third billing behind Steven Strait and Dominique Tripper since season 1, until being fired for cause during post production of season 5) still appears in the cast and crew bar for each episode in season 6, even though he doesn’t appear in any episodes. Also, Thomas Jane, who appeared in 32 episodes doesn’t always appear where you’d expect him to when viewing earlier seasons. Hmmm… :thinking:

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And it’s not just tv shows. I just noticed that in movies, infuse only shows the first 15 actors on the cast and crew bar ? !!

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Yes, they do hard cap the number of actors they’ll display. I presume it’s to keep the interface snappy … but I’d much rather accept a pause when I reach the end of the scroll to load more actors (on demand) than not have access to the complete list at all. I know they already exist in the local on-device database, so its really weird we can’t see them.

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Any updates on this ?

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Can this be moved to suggestions please? Will get my vote

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It’s weird that neither @james nor @NC_Bullseye commented on this yet !

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Please fix this. I have to go directly to TMDb or IMDb to see who is actually in the episodes.

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Why would Infuse cap the number of cast and crew shown to 15?! If a movie has 30 actors show me all 30! Or at least give me a way to see them all. On iPad and AppleTV the list is just truncated and that’s that. I could have 100 actors listed in an NFO file but I’ll only ever see the first 15. Insane. The shortcomings of this app continue to astonish me. Is there a way around this issue?

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