Any chance of getting the metadata to be able to show guest stars for a specific TV show episode?
For example, I was just watching Season 2, Episode 4 of House and noticed that Ron Livingston (from Office Space) is a guest star. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that Channels brings in guest stars into the metadata for specific episodes?
Also I find it interesting that if I search for Ron Livingston, he comes up for Boardwalk Empire. He was a regular (in opening credits) for season 4. However, the cast list doesn't show him anywhere.
It does seem like the cast list is static and doesn't refresh when a show changes over time. Another good example is MASH - it only shows the cast for the last season. Really disappointing to not see the rest of the major actors from earlier seasons.
Are there any plans in place to fix this?
Channels gets cast information from the guide data so, if it didn't get the name of one guest star, I'm guessing that this piece of information was not provided in the guide data. In this case, that would be Gracenote to blame, I believe.
It seems Channels should run its own high quality metadata service.
Hilarious joke my man
That might be why Plex mostly has its own metadata service now (pulled from a variety of sources). They do actually show guest appearances in specific episodes. They also show the cast properly when actors change from one season to another.
So there's really 2 different topics here:
Not bringing in guest star appearances in specific episodes - that I can understand as it might not even be in the Gracenote data (but would be really nice to bring in if it is there).
Not showing cast properly when a season changes - the metadata is there for this as I can search for an actor and it will show me the show they're in, but then I have no idea what season or episode they're in since the Credits doesn't correctly update when changing episodes or seasons. Even better would be to have the search present a listing of specific episodes an actor is in, instead of just the show.