I recently purchased the Toshiba HD-XA1 and I have a question for other owners out there. Do you guys have a problem passing video threw the 990 using a HDMI to DVI cable? I know you can not pass audio threw the cable I just want to make sure that before I spend the money on new cables there are no issues passing the video portion. I had to get a new satellite box this past week and I want to take advantage of the HDMI connection. Right know I just have an HDMI to HDMI cable running from the XA1 to the wall jack I have going to the projector so in order to take advantage of the HDMI on the sat. box I need to run both connections threw the 990 and let it do video switching. Thanks in advance

I haven't heard of anybody using the Toshiba HD-DVD players having any trouble with the 990's DVI switching. We'll see what others report, though.

I use the 990's dvi ports to switch between a hr10-250 D* tivo, and the toshiba hd-a1. The outlaw has given me no problems with video quality switching the hd-a1. There has been an ocasional hdmi error if I have the hr10-250's dvi input selected when starting a hd dvd, but if the hd-a1's dvi input is selected, then no hdmi errors. Note using the outlaw does NOT create the colorspace issues that can arise when connecting the hdmi output of the toshiba to a dvi device....as long as the device on the output of the 990's dvi out is a hdmi device, and not dvi. There is a known problem with the toshiba when connected to dvi devices, and using versions 1.4 and above firmware. The one problem I have seen is when playing audio CD's (commercial) on the hd-a1 (which btw is a pretty good cd player). I have found that there might be some sort of hdcp handshake/negotiation issue, because the hd-a1 freezes up just about every time when a cd is ejected (no problem with hddvd's or sddvd's). If the 990 is left off, cd's eject with no problem....but it is little difficult to appreciate a good cd with your pre turned off . Luckily a better solution was found, if the hdmi cable is unplugged from the toshiba while it is starting up, and then plugged back in after the startup initialization, cd's eject just fine.

Now that is quirky - so it freezes when ejecting CD's if allowed to establish an HDCP handshake at startup, but works OK if it has no HDMI connection during startup?

mind boggling isn't it? Was a real pain to troubleshoot too, what with having to sit through the toshiba's slooowwww startup from the hard boot to get it responding again.

Okay, my next question. I wanted to try the 7.1 direct input today to see how much of a difference there was compaired to the fiber optic connection and all speakers worked except the center channel. I went into the Toshibas setup menu to use there speaker calibration and all speakers worked just fine including the center. Is there a setting somewhere that I just don't know about. Thanks in advance.

Never mind my last post, I figured it out less then 2 minutes after I posted the question. I had all connections at the 990 correct but I had the center and subwwofer connection the the XA1 backwards. Everything sounds beautiful now.