I am a complete newbie...so forgive my ignorance....I have a high end laptop with a blu ray player. It also has HDMI. I also have a Pioner Elite receiver that does alot of great things for DVDs like DTS 5.1, but not HD audio decoding (i.e. DTS-HD). I can hook my laptop into the receiver and it will play 1080p on my plasma, but only give me what appears to be stereo sound on the audio end. The laptop has windows vista on it. I have tried PowerDVD 8 ultra, and no dice. The most that I get is the THX opening in Dolby, then it kicks down to stereo. Is there any software that will do the decoding first, then allow my receiver to pick up some of the HD sound through the HDMI connection? Thanks for any advice. Forgive my stupidity!!!
Does the laptop (and the software) actually support multichannel audio via HDMI, or just video? With PowerDVD, was it correctly set up? DTS-HD Audio always includes the original DTS Core stream so should be perfectly able to be decoded on your Pioneer amp as long as PowerDVD is set to output the Audio as a bitstream rather than decoding internally. Additionally, it is quite possible that the HDMI Output needs to be properly configured for your laptop. By default, most HDMI Audio is set to stereo, not surround (Why I do not know but there you go) so a check on this might prove useful. Good Luck.
