[bornasghosts]

I know this is perhaps more of a hardware question, but thought I'd give it a shot. I'm buying my first HDTV tomorrow and I have XBMC on my laptop which has an HDMI out (I've tested all of this on another HDTV and it worked great).

I have a surround sound system plugged into the TV. A lot of my .mkv files have dolby digital sound, but I'm not sure exactly how I'd go about making sure my TV uses the surround sound when this is the case. Has anybody tried it? Does it just work by itself? I'm pretty unsure about it and just wondering what to expect

[bodhi]

I know this is perhaps more of a hardware question, but thought I'd give it a shot. I'm buying my first HDTV tomorrow and I have XBMC on my laptop which has an HDMI out (I've tested all of this on another HDTV and it worked great).

I have a surround sound system plugged into the TV. A lot of my .mkv files have dolby digital sound, but I'm not sure exactly how I'd go about making sure my TV uses the surround sound when this is the case. Has anybody tried it? Does it just work by itself? I'm pretty unsure about it and just wondering what to expect

That's really depending on whether the receiver has HDMI Input or is it an old receiver which only has Optical or Coaxial audio input?

- If it's a new receiver w/ HDMI input then, it should have HDMI out to TV, so you'll be fine. Connect the laptop HDMI to the receiver and receiver's HDMI out to the HDTV.

- If it's old receiver, things get a little more complicated. When you run XBMC and output that to the HDTV by HDMI, it'll carry both video and surround sound to the TV. However, only certain HDTVs are capable of re-route surround sound from an external source to the receiver (in this case the laptop that is running XBMC). Virtually all HDTVs will output surround sound from the broadcast program from its tuner to the receiver through an Optical or Coaxial audio output.

And btw, this is really applicable to all media players. Using XBMC as example keeps it on topic

[mitul103]

- If it's old receiver, things get a little more complicated. When you run XBMC and output that to the HDTV by HDMI, it'll carry both video and surround sound to the TV. However, only certain HDTVs are capable of re-route surround sound from an external source to the receiver (in this case the laptop that is running XBMC). Virtually all HDTVs will output surround sound from the broadcast program from its tuner to the receiver through an Optical or Coaxial audio output.

Yeah, if you can't get surround sound this way, hopefully your computer has optical out so you can connect it directly to the receiver which will get you surround sound. (I'm assuming that your receiver doesn't support HDMI since you are trying to route it through the TV currently).