Replacing of artists with same name

[LangMarcus]

If different actors have the same name, only the last one found during scraping will be used. This means that all movies with that name will show the same actor — even older ones that were already scraped before.

Example:
Total Recall 2012
Artist: Colin Farrell, 1976
Caprona - Das vergessene Land (1974)
Artist: Colin Farrell, 1938

This results in wrong links to actors for the movies.

Used Version
3.1.1

[KarellenX]

Yes, that is a long standing problem in Kodi.
Kodi has only basic handling of actors and cannot distinguish between different actors with the same name.

The only way around this is to use nfo files and rename actors to use a prefix. Something like Colin Farrell (I), Colin Farrell (II). I like your idea of using the birth year also... Colin Farrell (1974)

@78andyp if you have any ideas.

[LangMarcus]

Okay, thanks for the info. I did not expect, that KODI have no support for artists with same name. Could you explain in short how KODI stores artist information?
I bet only based on full name and no further identifier that would prevent name collision.

[KarellenX]

See database schema... https://kodi.wiki/view/Databases/MyVideos#actor

[78andyp]

Yes, that is a long standing problem in Kodi. Kodi has only basic handling of actors and cannot distinguish between different actors with the same name.

The only way around this is to use nfo files and rename actors to use a prefix. Something like Colin Farrell (I), Colin Farrell (II). I like your idea of using the birth year also... Colin Farrell (1974)

@78andyp if you have any ideas.

Yeah, Kodi only stores actors by name. Here are the first few entries from my actors table:

I like the idea of year of birth, but you are probably them (in the current implimentation) limited to nfos for any/all actor updates and future media where you want to use the same actor as I'm sure the scraper will just revert to the name.

It would be relatively straight-forward to add the birth year IF the scrapers actually return it (otherwise they would need rewriting - assuming the resource they scrape distinguishes actors in that way) and we'd also have the issue of existing actors in the table - how would we know which is which if they have the same name.

Actor handling (and the handling of actor art - esp import/export) does need improving and it's something I want to look at after bluray stuff is done.

[LangMarcus]

I don't know what other information could be considered reliable for making artists more unique. When the scraper source doesn't provide a birthdate, you could use a placeholder value that normally wouldn't occur — perhaps 0 or 1000, or something similar. Since I'm not familiar with how these fields are used within Kodi for presentation, it's a bit tricky for me to judge which solution might be the best.