Nvidia thought of everything...almost.

With all the work Nvidia puts into their Forceware software, it's a shame that the general consumer isn't aware of all the features available to them. Nvidia has included many advanced features in their drivers – with a bit of tweaking one may realize the full benefits.

I'm playing with some HDTV setups at my house and somewhere hidden deep inside their software is a feature to adjust custom resolutions for odd HDTV resolutions. Do you notice that your media center looks stretched or whacked out? Does it look like the font isn't very sharp? Chances are your resolution is set wrong, and if you have an Nvidia video card in that unit you should be able to adjust the resolution to suit your screen.There are also other Media Center features that Nvidia has locked into their software. Using their DVD Decoder you can experience many added benefits in Media Center, including the ability to recall screen settings from individual DVD movies. If you're really serious about video quality then features like this and Purevideo make a huge difference in the overall screen quality. I must say, I'm really happy to see Nvidia’s influence on the home theater market, and I am certain that their upcoming products are going to blow some minds.

I believe Nvidia really wants to make it clear that their video quality is superior to their competition, even in a home theater environment. I think they should put more emphasis on their TV Tuners because they really do make the best TV Tuner solution at the moment for Media Center. Some don’t give them enough credit for their TV Tuners, and in fact I believe they don’t give themselves enough credit either. They can do so much better with minor tweaks. Hopefully someone will read this and do something about it.

Read this carefully ATi and Nvidia. With some slight changes, one of you could take the entire home theater PC market by storm. It would be amazing to see a PCI Express 1X Dual TV Tuner solution with dual HDMI and audio inputs. This would be the most fantastic TV Tuner design ever especially if it was scalable and it supported both Linux and Windows MCE. What would be even cooler is if we could then stream the television to remote locations with an easy to use interface.

Understandably cable HDTV cards are far out on the horizon, but the next best solution would be to take existing technology and make it better. Don't worry about cutting costs, go with gold connections, use higher quality components, and if you're worried about the price don't sweat it because anyone asking for this type of tech wouldn't mind paying a big premium for it. I think a reasonable price for a high end dual HD capture card like this would be around the same price as a high end video card.

Now, let's go innovate, and when you have something fantastic for me to look at let me know. I'd love to include it in our new Media Center systems.