HDMI

[Dymetrie]

So a few months ago my brother came round my house and saw the ickle mediabox thingummy whatsit that me and Paul built and plugged into our TV. My brother being my brother liked what he saw and concocted plans to steal our technological expertise...

Now, thanks to Morba and MB, next week I should be getting a lovely little shuttle system to turn into a fully functioning media centre for my brother. And this is where it gets complicated.

He's got a lovely Samsung LCD TV with both VGA and HDMI input. I can run the mediabox with purely HDMI but the speakers on the TV aren't great and so he's looking (at my insistence that 5.1 is great) on getting a decent surround system. The problem comes from the sound input.

I've looked at HDMI cables and can get one which runs DVI->HDMI (I has the converter for the GFX card if needed) but where does this leave the sound?

Ideally he wants the sound from everything running through one set of speakers. He has audio output on his TV and obviously there's audio output from the mediabox. But how to get the 2 outputs to work together?

HDMI states that it is A/V, but without an input to the PC sound card then where does it get the audio from?

This leads me to the question: "How do I organise sound from both TV and mediabox without having to get up to change connections and getting decent sound?"

Can I get the HDMI running the sound from the PC into the TV and then out into the speakers?

Can I run the sound from the TV into the PC and then out to the speakers?

Do I just get even more cables and splice the two together?

Suggestions on a postcard to "WTF is Dym on about, Freepost 007, confusedville".