What does what?

[Mr Peabody]

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?

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

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?

Only televisions with the DD sign on them can decode a dolby bitstream. Most televisions don't have that sign, and cannot decode the bitstream. In that case you have to figure out how to get a decoded signal(which would be PCM) to the television.

[markw]

Only televisions with the DD sign on them can decode a dolby bitstream. Most televisions don't have that sign, and cannot decode the bitstream. In that case you have to figure out how to get a decoded signal(which would be PCM) to the television.

The simplist method to accomplish this would be to run a simple red/white analog audio pair to the DVD analog audio input TV. Leave the digital link conneced to the receiver for when they want the big guns. When running the DVD audio through the receiver, simply turn the TV volume all the way down.

[pixelthis]

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?

Never really thought about it.
I have a similar setup and sometimes listen to the speakers when I DONT WANT TO TURN EVERYTHING ON ,
and it just works.
If you set the output to dolby digital it should work, or more simply
just do what mark said.
If you do what mark said there wil probably be a switch somewhere in the menu to switch from HDMI audio to analog.