I have an FullHD TV and just got a Blu-Ray player. I connected the HDMI connection from the player to the back of the TV and the SPDIF(optical) connection from the back of the TV to my Yamaha HTR-5835 receiver and it does not pick up the 5.1 sound track coming from the Blu-Ray player. I have talked to a home theater expert and he said that I have it connected it up correctly. I do get 5.1 coming from broadcast TV stations. How do get the 5.1 sound that is going through the HDMI cable to pass through to the optical connector from the back of the TV to my receiver? I know that I can connect the coaxial audio connector from the Blu-Ray player to the receiver and get 5.1 sound. I guess I'm wanting to know if the TV should pass the 5.1 sound to the receiver. I'm wanting to reduce all the cables around the TV. What I'm thinking is that if I had a set top box that was HDMI compliant it would sort everything out.
Does you receiver have a HDMI out? If it does it would be FAR easier to run everything in to the receiver and just have the one HDMI cable going from your receiver to the television. You would select sources with the receiver and your TV becomes more like a PC monitor, just a slave to the receiver. The TV may or may not pass through AC3 / DTS. Check your user manual or post the model name of your TV.
If your Blu-ray player, and receiver has 5.1 anologue input/outputs I suggest using those, this way you can get HD audio. If your setup allows this you will need to set your BD player up to do the audio decoding. If you cannot accomplish this, you need to set your BD player to send the audio via optical, instead of HDMI.
