Greg. Take a run down to your local BB and take a look at the card. Given that AMD/ATI have put hdmi out on their igp chipsets and it is in the spec for the 3800 I would be very surprised if it wasnt on the 3000 series cards.

FWIW, that MS white paper stated that the initial release of Vista would not support True HD and HD-DTS. That suggests that there were/are significant challenges in passing it through the pc in a 'safe' (as MS likes to put it) manner. There is a possiblility that MS still dosn't have the drm code in place to do this reliably. The paper did say that handling both video and audio posed significant challenges (they are authenticated and DRMed through separate channels/processes.

Fred

Is this all in an anti-piracy effort? Sure DVD's are pirated regularly right now, and I guess it pays to be future-proof, but nobody realistically right now is going to be pirating these things. It's no problem to get the security settings off the Blu-Rays, but nobody has bandwidth to really download 25 gig images, and these pirating kids don't have the money to be buying $500 BR burners and the media to go along with them...

I suppose that will change in time, but in the mean-time the people that HAVE the money, the HTPC hobbyists, are suffering.

Yes, yes it is. Like they care about their customers.

Greg, I have the same 2 channel S/PDIF optical problem as you do. It’s been such a headache I just gave up and stayed with 5.1 analogue connections for now.

If you do an internet search for something like “only getting stereo from sound card with S/PDIF” or some other similar wording you will find this is a common problem. In theory all you should need to do is set your sound device and playback software to pass thru S/PDIF, AC3/DTS or however your software lables it. However, it didn't prove that simple for me.

Wish I could be more help,

Dean