Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

I have a media center laptop with a blu-ray drive. The laptop has a hdmi out port so I'm able to connect it to the receiver or the tv and watch blu's or stream any kind of HD content. My question is whether there is any way to get 5.1 through my receiver. When I hook it up I get sound through the system but it's not 5.1

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

check the laptop's audio settings. it may be set on headphones or stereo speakers or something. You should be able to change that. Are you sure that your laptop is capable of sending both audio and video through hdmi? Or that it's enabled to do so? If your receiver handles hdmi from another source with 5.1, then I'd bet it's the laptop settings.

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

I have my desktop computer hooked up to my home theater. Just as dick_grayson said, I had to change the settings on my computer for the audio to come out the way I wanted. Most people don't use their computers for these purposes, so I'm betting your laptop, probably like most computers, has a different default audio setting.

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

I am positive my laptop does audio through hdmi.

When I connect my computer to the receiver I change the output device to HDMI Digital output device which says "high definition audio device" but I'm not sure what other settings to change to get that to play a 5.1 mix.

EDIT: Also when it's hooked up through my receiver the display says Nueral audio where it normally says multichannel or dolby for dvd's and blurays.

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

I haven't tried my laptop on a receiver, but I have used it just on an LCD TV. Looks pretty good, but it seems impossible to get a normal frame rate, like a good TV broadcast- even playing DVDs through its built-in drive have a slower frame rate than on a normal player. Is video from internet sites capable of having a normal frame rate and my computer just can't handle it, or is it inherently less than perfect? Would be nice if it could be TV-quality, but watching TV shows online still beats over-the-air just because there aren't any network logos or other on-screen crap!

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

what is the laptop output set to? Open volume control or whatever and it may be set on 2.0 or something like that. it doesn't sound like it's your receiver. it's the laptop that's set for non-5.1.

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

Sounds like your CPU or video card is too slow. Possibly updated drivers for the video would help.

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

The output is set to HDMI and when I click on properties for it I don't see anything about 2.0 or 5.1 The closest thing I get is "supported formats" and then Dolby Digital and DTS are both checked. Maybe there's another option somewhere else that I'm missing.

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

What type of laptop is it, that is, make and model?

Re: Any way to hook laptop up to home theater receiver?
 

Are you only judging this by checking for something to light up on your receiver to tell you it is decoding?

My guess is that your laptop is doing the decoding and sending the audio to your receiver that is already decoded. In that case, your receiver is just taking the decoded audio and passing it through to the speakers.

Just like stand alone Blu-ray players, there are mutliple ways of getting multi-channel audio to play on your system. With HDMI there are 2 ways...

1- The player decodes the audio and sends it to the receiver. When doing this, nothing will light up on your receiver telling you it is multi-channel. Some receivers will have a light that says "direct" or something like that. Some don't.

2- The player takes the undecoded audio track and send it to the receiver where the receiver will then decode that audio for you. This is when you get the lights on telling you it is decoding.

With a laptop, you have a built in audio decoder which is likely doing the work and sending the receiver an already decoded signal. Your audio card is decoding it and sending it to your receiver.

Now I can not be totally sure without me actually sitting in front of it and checking out your settings, etc., but I would guess that is the issue.

What receiver do you have? Are you hearing audio out of all 5 channels?