REWRITTEN because I learned something: and so I’m updating my request.
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Infuse recently switched to supporting/enforcing local override of TMDB cast data for all users who have local .nfo files; regardless if those files even have
<cast>
tags. -
This also applies to individual Television episodes.
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TMDB identifies actors as either Season Regulars or Guest Stars.
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TMDB further list Series Regulars and Guest Stars in a specific order, representing their precedence in the production (or studio contracts) and reflected in their names’ placement in the shows credits.
In the above link, you can see how this order can be edited on TMDB. That order is maintained by assigning each cast member a specific precedence number (for lack of the official term) for each episode in which they appear. When APIs scrape TMDB for cast information, this number is made available — it is utilized as the data for the actor tag.
<actor>
<name></name>
<role></role>
<order></order>
<thumb></thumb>
</actor>
This benefits users is that the stars of the show are featured most prominently in the cast & crew bar on Infuse’s details (or pre-playback) pages.
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Infuse must already utilize this tag when scraping TMDB natively, because I’ve never had actors appear out of order before Infuse was updated to support (force) cast overrides in the presence of local .nfo files.
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But if an Infuse user has .nfo tags with his files, for any reason, Infuse will no longer display cast and crew in the sensible way it does when scraping from TMDB. Instead, it will only display the first 15 cast members listed in the local .nfo file — without regard to how prominent that actor might be in that series or episode — or display none at all, if the Infuse user’s .nfo files had no
<actor>
tags at all, because they preferred to let Infuse & TMDB do it’s good work of keeping track of cast and crew all by itself. -
Since not all software solutions that create .nfo files write actors to the .nfo in the order of their precedence in the show, and because Infuse isn’t reading the accompanying actor
<order>
tags, users stuck in that position have found the Cast and Crew bar become a mess overnight. -
Fixing this won’t resolve the other issue this update caused: the creation of parallel cast databases and duplication of every cast member in one’s library … but I’ve already written about extensively in a different thread).
…
Two suggested solutions: (You can chose both, but at least implement one!)
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Expand
<actor>
tag support in local .nfo files to include utilizing the<order>
tag. -
Allow users to opt out of Cast & Crew override, even if they have local .nfo files which they require for other purposes (such as altering movie titles to get around TMDB’s and Firecore’s lack of support for multiple versions and encodings) …
Thank you…