It is my (?mis-) understanding that the ATI card can pass the HDMI audio
signal if you have the appropriate drivers installed for your video codec,
e.g. a fully licensed Blu-ray software package. The useless crud Blu-ray
player that comes with most drives will only pass the video signal out the
HDMI port on the ATI card, and not very well at that. You have to connect
stereo out cables from your computer to your television--why bother with
Blu-ray if you are not going to also use surround sound?
As it is sort of pointless to watch HD video programming on anything other
than a large screen HD television, there is little more than imaginary
difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray disc viewed on a computer monitor,
Blu-ray software for computers is not really worth purchasing IMHO. Most of
the reviews of these software packages I have seen conclude that the
programs too often do not work properly outputting to an HDTV over HDMI
because of unresolvable DRM issues that are not supposed to exist.
Finally the price of stand-alone Blu-ray players to connect to HD
televisions is coming down to real world price points and they are far more
convenient to use than a computer based system.

"nomore" <fac_187********.com> wrote in message
news:5EA05DE3-E271-4013-A354-556FF534F818@microsoft.com...[color=blue]
> It is my (?mis-) understanding that the ATI card can pass the HDMI audio
> signal if you have the appropriate drivers installed for your video codec,
> e.g. a fully licensed Blu-ray software package. The useless crud Blu-ray
> player that comes with most drives will only pass the video signal out the
> HDMI port on the ATI card, and not very well at that. You have to connect
> stereo out cables from your computer to your television--why bother with
> Blu-ray if you are not going to also use surround sound?[/color]

The HD Audio device should still be detected, regardless. Windows even
installed generic drivers for mine. It should be possible to use HDMI for
both audio and video when using your TV as a monitor. I se no mention of
BluRay in the original post.
[color=blue]
> As it is sort of pointless to watch HD video programming on anything other
> than a large screen HD television, there is little more than imaginary
> difference between a DVD and a Blu-ray disc viewed on a computer monitor,[/color]

There's something wrong with your eyes, my friend. A 24" widescreen monitor
runs at a native resolution of 1920x1200, more than enough to show all 1080
lines of a 1080p video. Smaller monitors will downscale this resulting in
an equally crisp image. Even Vista's lowest resolution of 800x600 should be
make a much better job of 720 or 1080 than the fuzzy results you get by
upscaling 480 SD content too far.

That said, I do agree that unless your computer monitor takes up half your
living room wall you're hardly going to get the cinematic experience. The
OP didn't mention a computer monitor, though. He/she did mention a TV in
the first line.