If it's the same as came on board the qnap, it uses imagemajick. Fair enough, until it starts to tackle >10 MB images on what is essentially a woefully underpowered pc.

Also, the gallery feature just suxors on a good day.

Good luck with that.  Why do they put bloaty shite on in the first place?

Got it sorted, in addition to removing the photo/media server apps, there's an option to remove the index itself and that's stopped the process.

I guess they lease/procure apps from 3rd parties and take a fee for including them in the software. HP used to be buggers for it, there's still a lot of crap on the desktop PCs we get at work, but nowhere near the amount they used to have, it'd take something like half a day to get rid of it all.

AFAIK the consumer NAS purveyors take open source, without thanks or attribution, and 'customize' it (aka fuck it up) with all kinds of half-assed, performance and stability -killing add-ons they think folks want.

I very much doubt that bit of tape does anything except keep the cable in place. So yeh, no worries.

Steve - they have all this crap on them so that they're out-of-the-box-useful for non-techie types. Good enough reason really, but a PITA.

Ace biscuits.

Now begins the long slog of ripping all our existing films n' that.

Just download. Don't bother wasting your time ripping, Jim will help.

I'm a bit anal about my media collection - ripped all my CDs a while back as FLAC and made sure all the album was correct. I recently started using Musicbee as a player and it pissed me off at first as it decided it was going to download what it thought I should have as album art rather than looking in the local folder for an image. I got this sorted after fiddling with the many many options it's got. :)

When it comes to films, I want a rip of the disc in high quality with the audio options configured to how I want them - you're always going to be chancing it with a download. I also get the option on whether or not to keep any extras, like audio commentary - something that's well worth it with the likes of Red Dwarf.  I appreciate it'll be quicker, but a DVD takes around 1.5 hours to rip, blu-rays maybe 2, but I can leave them going during the day/overnight while I'm doing other stuff. It's not an inconvenience, just time consuming.

If it's a full and complete rip then that definitely makes sense, rather than reencoding/compressing.

I don't like to download low quality rips, but I also don't want a full 30GB+ blu-ray rip taking up loads of space!