I was reconnecting a friend's system over the weekend, it was set up by the cable guy and my friend has no idea what is what. He wanted to be able to watch movies from his DirecTV and listen through his surround set up. That was easy enough, I ran HDMI to his Panasonic Plasma and an optical audio connection to his receiver which obviously is not HDMI compliant. Then I saw he was using composite from his DVD. So I ran HDMI from his DVD to the Plasma and again a digital audio connection to the receiver, this time coax though. Everything was working great until we tried to watch a DVD through the TV without the receiver being on. He has a cheap Phillips DVD player. I had to set the output to bitstream in order for his receiver to do Dolby Digital.

Here's my question after seeing this issue, can HDTV's decode bitstream? Are they supposed to? I believe most DVD players will output analog from the RCA and bitstream at the same time. I'm not sure if the problem was in the cheap DVD player or maybe there was a setting inside the Panasonic to make it accept bitstream. After figuring out what all his gear did I stopped short of going into his Panasonic menu and he couldn't find the manual. He said they usually have the surround on anyway while watching DVD.

So either the Phillips was limited to only one audio output at a time or certain, or all, HDTV's are not able to decode bitstream.

Anyone know?