NVIDIA has now made it possible for you to watch HD DVD or Blu-ray movies on your PC with some new video drivers having PureVideo HD technology. The PureVideo technology encompasses multiple features that will help improve the video portion of your multimedia experience with your PC.

Aside from just creating the drivers to support the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats, PureVideo provides some hardware acceleration to decode H.264, VC-1, WMV and MPEG-2 movies that will make images clearer than normal, and up to six times the detail of a regular DVD movie. The driver software will also help your PC run a little more efficiently when using multiple applications since it takes on some of the video processing instead of taxing the PC’s CPU and 3D engine.

“This is a milestone in PC entertainment,” stated Scott Vouri who is general manager of multimedia at NVIDIA. “NVIDIA is proud to be the first graphics processing company in the world to make it possible for consumers to build or upgrade a PC to play HD DVD and Blu-ray movies.”

This is really a great solution and a significant step forward in enabling HD and Blu-ray playback but it does not come without a few requirements, and unfortunately these requirements are not light. You can just download the PureVideo HD drivers, and that part is easy enough. You will also need a 7 series NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, or at least a PCI Express card with the NVIDIA GeForce 7 HDCP-capable GPU, CryptoROM and at least 256MB of graphics memory available, but that is not all.

In addition, you will obviously need a disc drive that supports the Blu-ray or HD DVD formats. The drivers and video card alone are not going to help you. You will need a HDCP-compliant display, and chances are if you have purchased the drive somewhere along the way you figured out you will need to see the picture somehow. For the last requirement, and someday soon this will probably not be that big of a deal, but you will need at least a dual-core CPU and 1GB of RAM.

If you have all of that then you are ready to enjoy the high definition video quality. If not, keep this list handy for your next upgrade or custom build.

Press Release [NVIDIA]