That gets murkier because HDMI Audio output can be either Line Level Analog Audio or S/PDIF and both can be sent down an HDMI cable. So its a matter of whether your sound card outputs one or both these methods and which method does your receiver take from the cable? It might even be selectable in a menu. I'd just go for the separate optical instead.

Sorry asked the question the wrong way.

Talking strictly about existing files on the puter for playback.  For my music files, use the separate soundcard optical out to the receiver or will the HDMI be the same quality wise ?

The receiver has a good 24 bit DAC so that is not a problem at that end.

HDMI Audio has 5 levels of audio quality depending on which level is encoded and how good the DAC decoding is. Some units don't support the high levels like Master Audio. Most of the Sony BR players do though.

I wouldn't run MacAfee on a music server because it can momentarily interrupt music or video playback during its many scans and it has software hooks into everything so it can grab focus from any task.  

Exactly.  I have a three puter subscription , but don't want to install it on the music puter for this reason.

I can do all the downloading of video files on the main and move them safely over to the server for HDMI playback thru the receiver to the TV. 

I just spoke to a tech at Crutchfield who said that the best quality video streaming would be thru a BR regardless of the quality of the vid card in the puter.

So I'll just do the puter to the receiver for its content only and live stream from the BR when I get one.

Last question.  Which audio signal would be better from the puter ?  The HDMI or optical out on the soundcard ?

I use a Sony BR Player to access youtube, Netflix and Hulu and it was only $70. MacAfee is bloatware and a resource hog. There are several very decent free programs that are better. Or better yet build a Hackintosh. I liked mine so much I built a second one for my music server also and never looked back.

Finally going to hook up the music PC to the AV and send the video to the TV receiver via HDMI.

Could'a should'a done it months ago.  A buddy gave us one of his Netflix codes months ago, too.

I wanted to keep the puter off the net altogether and keep MacAfee off of it.  But the time has come.

Or does anyone know how safe youtube, vimeo and netfix are regarding virus' ?  I would love to keep MA off of this puter.

Also its an XP rig.  Does one browser do better with the sites list above or does it matter ?  I'm thinking of installing Google Chrome.  Never used anything other than IE, ever.  I was told when I built the puter to never upgrade the original install for IE.  That is when things start getting wonky I'm told.  The OS is an OEM XP SP3.  Never been updated and don't want too.  This was just supposed to be the just music server and never see the net.

Or should I just go out and buy a BR DVD player and access the net with it instead ?

Now I must listen to Magic Bus Live. Who

Red_Dragon wrote:
You left the magic dust in there, right?

Well, using a tiny common screwdriver because none of our tiny Phillips screwdrivers would fit P was able to get all the tiny screws out. She did it because even with two pairs of reading glasses on, I couldn't see the damn things well enough to work with them. Anyway, while there was a fair amount of fine stuff in there the thing was not filled with dust bunnies as I was expecting. I used a can of air to blow it all out and P put all the tiny screws back and damned if it doesn't still work.

As I said, I'm not writing off the old Macbook just yet. I think I may wind up shipping it to Ray for cleaning and hard drive (with a SSD) replacement. I did the hardware reset procedure he recommended and things have improved a lot.

Years ago when we got Justine a netbook for work, it was about 3 weeks before it got totally cobbed up. It had all sorts of demos on it and just crippled itself asap. Ptooey directed me to a site where someone had the same model, stripped all the nonessential crap out of it and put that OS online as a disk image. I burned that to a CD, used that CD to reformat the hard drive (all legal because it used the Windows serial # that was on a sticker on the bottom of the computer. Then once I got it customized (bookmarks, passwords, extra software, etc) I made a disk image of the new clean OS so I'd have something to fall back to. Never needed it. Once I got all the chaff off of the thing it ran fine for quite a while.

So

1. Take a photo of the sticker on the machine with your Windows serial #, because if it's like the netbook's, it'll get worn off soon.
2. Look around for someone who's done a similar fix of the OS like ptooey found for me.
3. Once it's set up how you like it, burn a disk image that you can go back to in case of Microsoft.

For $300 it's worth doing a little of this sort of stuff. 

Browsed around Best Buy a bit this afternoon and learned that I can get a nice Gateway laptop for a little over $300 if I need to. Not ready to write off the old Apple just yet, tho.

Browsed around Best Buy a bit this afternoon and learned that I can get a nice Gateway laptop for a little over $300 if I need to. Not ready to write off the old Apple just yet, tho.

i've had good performance with gateway

do you need the portability?

and what's the budget?

Anyone have an opinion regarding Gateway's laptops?

Anyone have an opinion regarding Gateway's laptops?