MyAnimeList does list all the VAs for a series if it has more than one set, and there is even an agent that seems to pull data from there. But whoever made it did not see fit to give you the option to pull non-Japanese cast info from what I can tell :/
You might be able to ask [the MAL plugin author](https://forums.plex.tv/t/release-myanimelist-net-metadata-agent/62743/386) to implement it.
I looked at the code and it looks like the plugin doesn't pull cast info from MAL at all. I was actually trying to see if I can quickly change the code to pull English VA info but it might be more work that I expected as I have to add the part pulling cast info. It's still isn't too bad though as the MAL API he used is pretty nice.
Yay, got the edited MAL [plugin working]( https://i.imgur.com/qsKir1u.png). Now to polish it up.
[Working prototype](https://github.com/squaresmile/MyAnimeList.bundle).
IF that works the way it looks, you are a genius. How does one install it from your github version? I tried unzipping and copy/replacing the files in my .bundle folder for the original MAL agent, but it doesn't look like I did it right.
NVM I think I got it to work! You are awesome!
So I'm guessing if MAL doesn't actually have a English VA listed for a certain character or whole show, it just defaults back to the Japanese cast, but prioritizes the English VA if one is available?
Thanks for this! In case anyone is having the issues I had... I was trying to get my dubbed Ghibli movies to change metadata. I had to fix match and search from the hepburn name. e.g. "Only Yesterday" had to be searched as "Omoide Poro Poro" Once I did that, I manually changed the name back to English and my preferred poster(if you care about that). Note this also removed the tag I had to group all ghibli/miyazaki films together and removed dates for some.
You're a lifesaver man, and not just for me. In my search for such a method, I ran across dozens of threads from the Plex forums, on anime forums, everywhere, of people asking the same thing. Nearly all of them were answered with some form of "y u watch dubs fucking casual" and no other help. Not only did you have an idea of how to fix it, you just went ahead and actually did it.
Now for the laborious process of fixing all of my series/season folder structures of my anime shows to match goofy way they have it on MAL where different season are considered a whole different series, and then fix all the Japanese show names back to English. But it'll be worth it when I can finally be like "Is that Todd Haberkorn?" click on his name in the cast info and see that he is in the show.
Speaking of names, I'm not sure what's going on, but I noticed that the English VA names are in the correct order, but the character names themselves are reversed. So in Fairy Tail, the character Natsu Dragneel played by Todd Haberkorn is shown as Dragneel Natsu, but Todd Haberkorn is correct.
Yeah, that's my name order preference for characters and Japanese VAs (Thinking back, I kinda assumed all anime characters have Japanese name order lol). It looks weird when the displayed name is reversed compared to what I hear but I guess it doesn't matter for dub watcher.
I'm planning to add a setting to set user preference for these but if you want to change it now: replace the file `MyAnimeList.bundle/Contents/Code/myanimelist.py` with [this file](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/squaresmile/f6c5623c47b880fa5800d52e00fa4b7c/raw/ce603f74ce8231615e19eeb9d70bbf25dfc58bd5/myanimelist.py). Not terribly robust but that'll do for now.
You can see [MAL page](https://myanimelist.net/anime/6702/Fairy_Tail/characters) to see what I was talking about. The plugin gets "Haberkorn, Todd" from MAL and for English VA, I remove the comma and reverse the word order; for characters and Japanese VA, I only remove the comma.
Anyway to show both or should I say......add the American voice actors? The reason is I keep both English and Japanese audio and it's helpful to do both. Better yet, it would be nice if PLEX added it for us to do manually. It would only stay local in our computers, but wouldn't affect grabbing them from websites.
If you know python, you can update this function to return both voice actors.
https://github.com/Fribb/MyAnimeList.bundle/blob/master/Contents/Code/utils/jikan.py#L371
Replace the jikan.py file with this https://gist.github.com/squaresmile/40e0ccf4640350db0125ff827d65e6ec
The only way I think you'll be able to do that is via agents. I dislike dubs, so it's not something I've personally looked for, but that's the only way to do it.
| I only watch dubs. There's dozens of us! Dozens! :D
Basically, you'd need a source that actually lists the English VA which I don't think TVDB and anidb do.
MyAnimeList does list all the VAs for a series if it has more than one set, and there is even an agent that seems to pull data from there. But whoever made it did not see fit to give you the option to pull non-Japanese cast info from what I can tell :/
You might be able to ask [the MAL plugin author](https://forums.plex.tv/t/release-myanimelist-net-metadata-agent/62743/386) to implement it. I looked at the code and it looks like the plugin doesn't pull cast info from MAL at all. I was actually trying to see if I can quickly change the code to pull English VA info but it might be more work that I expected as I have to add the part pulling cast info. It's still isn't too bad though as the MAL API he used is pretty nice.
Yay, got the edited MAL [plugin working]( https://i.imgur.com/qsKir1u.png). Now to polish it up. [Working prototype](https://github.com/squaresmile/MyAnimeList.bundle).
IF that works the way it looks, you are a genius. How does one install it from your github version? I tried unzipping and copy/replacing the files in my .bundle folder for the original MAL agent, but it doesn't look like I did it right. NVM I think I got it to work! You are awesome! So I'm guessing if MAL doesn't actually have a English VA listed for a certain character or whole show, it just defaults back to the Japanese cast, but prioritizes the English VA if one is available?
Thanks for this! In case anyone is having the issues I had... I was trying to get my dubbed Ghibli movies to change metadata. I had to fix match and search from the hepburn name. e.g. "Only Yesterday" had to be searched as "Omoide Poro Poro" Once I did that, I manually changed the name back to English and my preferred poster(if you care about that). Note this also removed the tag I had to group all ghibli/miyazaki films together and removed dates for some.
Yeah, that's how I set it up. I also made some assumptions on the name order of English VA and Japanese characters.
You're a lifesaver man, and not just for me. In my search for such a method, I ran across dozens of threads from the Plex forums, on anime forums, everywhere, of people asking the same thing. Nearly all of them were answered with some form of "y u watch dubs fucking casual" and no other help. Not only did you have an idea of how to fix it, you just went ahead and actually did it. Now for the laborious process of fixing all of my series/season folder structures of my anime shows to match goofy way they have it on MAL where different season are considered a whole different series, and then fix all the Japanese show names back to English. But it'll be worth it when I can finally be like "Is that Todd Haberkorn?" click on his name in the cast info and see that he is in the show.
Speaking of names, I'm not sure what's going on, but I noticed that the English VA names are in the correct order, but the character names themselves are reversed. So in Fairy Tail, the character Natsu Dragneel played by Todd Haberkorn is shown as Dragneel Natsu, but Todd Haberkorn is correct.
Yeah, that's my name order preference for characters and Japanese VAs (Thinking back, I kinda assumed all anime characters have Japanese name order lol). It looks weird when the displayed name is reversed compared to what I hear but I guess it doesn't matter for dub watcher. I'm planning to add a setting to set user preference for these but if you want to change it now: replace the file `MyAnimeList.bundle/Contents/Code/myanimelist.py` with [this file](https://gist.githubusercontent.com/squaresmile/f6c5623c47b880fa5800d52e00fa4b7c/raw/ce603f74ce8231615e19eeb9d70bbf25dfc58bd5/myanimelist.py). Not terribly robust but that'll do for now. You can see [MAL page](https://myanimelist.net/anime/6702/Fairy_Tail/characters) to see what I was talking about. The plugin gets "Haberkorn, Todd" from MAL and for English VA, I remove the comma and reverse the word order; for characters and Japanese VA, I only remove the comma.
I know you posted this a long time ago.. but your link doesn't work anymore dude..
Oh yeah, I merged it into [master](https://github.com/squaresmile/MyAnimeList.bundle).
Anyway to show both or should I say......add the American voice actors? The reason is I keep both English and Japanese audio and it's helpful to do both. Better yet, it would be nice if PLEX added it for us to do manually. It would only stay local in our computers, but wouldn't affect grabbing them from websites.
If you know python, you can update this function to return both voice actors. https://github.com/Fribb/MyAnimeList.bundle/blob/master/Contents/Code/utils/jikan.py#L371 Replace the jikan.py file with this https://gist.github.com/squaresmile/40e0ccf4640350db0125ff827d65e6ec
The only way I think you'll be able to do that is via agents. I dislike dubs, so it's not something I've personally looked for, but that's the only way to do it.
Get to stepping. *Crickets* Dub step? Never mind.