Music thumbnails in Windows Media Center

Since upgrading to Vista, something has been bugging me when playing music. The problem is album art. I am using a 50" LCD and the album art looks very low res, I told myself I would look in to why the image quality looks so poor but I never got round to it.

Then Jason Dunn of Digital Media Thoughts posted an article called I’m Sick and Tired of Looking at Ugly Album Art where he highlights the problem of Ugly Album Art. He points out that the images used in the Vista version of Windows Media Center are low-resolution:

The problem is that the album art displayed is the low-resolution (200 x 200 or 240 x 240) highly-compressed JPEGs pulled from the folder, rather than the 600 x 600 lightly compressed JPEGs I have embedded in the file itself. The result is a badly pixellated image that looks quite bad on my 26” LCD TV. It’s hard to show you how this looks online, but here’s my best effort

He is not the only one that has noticed this problem on TheDigitalLifestyle.com forums slig posted Auto Resizing CoverArt is a NO, NO for M$!

I have been looking for a solution to this for a long time [the whole day] and have come to a conclusion that microsoft resizes ALL the artwork that is pasted in WMP11 to 200×200, no matter it the original size is; 500×500 or 1000×1000, still it will resize it to some crap quality art covers. IF you use VMC and you are viewing "Now Playing" you know the cover art is really Crappy. , 500×500 covers that get resized to 200×200 is a big amount and you might have noticed the pain, just to let people know how BIG of difference it makes here is a screenshot: [left is a 500×500 image, and on the right is the resized art in VMC]

You can see from the example Slig posted it makes a massive difference:

So can anybody suggest a way to fix this bug feature? In a HD word it seems crazy that Media Center is using 200×200 artwork even though the track may have hi-res images embedded in it