Happy Holidays all! I am in the market for a blue ray player and TV. Don't know yet what I will get.

Concerning Video connection. Gonk said:
"
Nope - there's no way for it to know or care that there's a DVI connector anywhere in the signal path, because it's nothing more than a pair of adapters that match up the different pin configurations. Seriously - going from HDMI to DVI for video is a passive and transparent process. The only thing that happens inside a DVI-to-HDMI adapter or cable is that the wires go to different shaped plugs. The same number of video wires pass through as would exist with DVI-to-DVI (single link) or HDMI-to-HDMI"

My question regarding DVI is this; can the 990 handle 1080p input from the blue ray (hdmi from blue ray to dvi at 990 end), and out through second dvi connection from 990 to TV, without loss of content? Mr. Lee Baily suggested it is better to connect player to TV directly, but I was hoping to route all through 990 for ease of control, and to avoid any lag between audio and video outputs. Also, I was told by a salesman that component video converts signal from 1080P down to 720P. Is this true of the 990?

Also, do I need another connection between TV and 990 in order to see the onscreen display?

Conerning audio, Mr. Baily said:

"As far as the audio, your best connection would be to use the 7.1 analogs between your player and the 990. Using the digital optical/coaxial connections for audio, you will get normal DTS and DD fine, though any of the higher resolution audio formats will have to be in PCM."

I don't know what PCM is. Will this be an issue with blue ray movies? if it is, I would need to make sure my blue ray has analog outputs. one player I was considering has 5.1 outputs only. I always thought that an optical connection was best for transmition of signal.

Good questions.

Firt, I haven't tried it, but I'm pretty certain that the 990's DVI switching will handle 1080p (no reason that it shouldn't considering the way they are handling DVI switching). Outlaw tech support could verify.

The salesman was oversimplifying (and not very accurately, at that). First, component video theoretically can do 1080p, but the implementations generally cap out at 1080i. No TV's I know of accept 1080p over component, although some will via VGA. Blu-ray, HD-DVD, and upscaling DVD players typically cannot output 1080p over component - they cap out at 1080i. HDTV broadcast standards do not even include 1080p (the two standards are 1080i and 720p, with a bunch of other options in there that nobody ever elected to use). In cases where you have a true 1080p source (basically just Blu-ray), the component output can do 720 or 1080i, and you can select which in the player based on which you prefer (I'd go with 1080i if I had a 1080i TV and 720p if I had a 720p or 768P TV - if you have a 1080p TV, you shouldn't be using component in the first place as you will have HDMI available). The 990 doesn't scale or deinterlace, so it isn't equipped to change a signal's resolution. If you actually have a source that produces 1080p over component (the XBox360 is the best example I can think of), the 990 won't deinterlace it to 1080i or scale it down to 720p - but its component switching wasn't designed for that much signal bandwidth, so I don't know how well it would pass the signal.

When pairing the 990 with a Blu-ray player, you need to understand what Blu-ray offers as far as audio. (My HDMI FAQ might be helpful in this regard - see my sig.) There is Dolby Digital Plus (which is almost never used), Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, and multichannel PCM ( pulse-code modulation ). PCM is the digital audio format we've been using for CD's for decades now, but they've simply upped the sampling rate and gone from two channels to as many as eight. The only connection into the 990 that supports these new formats is the 7.1 analog input, because the coaxial and optical formats don't have enough bandwidth. Coaxial and optical will still work fine for DVD and CD, but all they will deliver with Blu-rays that include the new formats is a "core" Dolby Digital or DTS track. You will need a player that can decode the new formats (TrueHD, DTS-HD High Resolution, DTS-HD Master Audio) and output them as multichannel analog. The immediate candidates for this are the Panasonic BD55 and Sony S550. Both offer all of the required decoding and 7.1 analog output. There are also a number of us who are waiting for OPPO Digital's BDP-83, which will likely arrive in a couple of months. Of course, if you won't have a 7.1 speaker setup, a player with 5.1 analog output would work just fine.

What about some of the "deep color" options that HDMI 1.3 offers? I don't think that these will be passed via DVI either.

You mean the "deep color" options that don't exist in any video source currently in existence or in the pipeline? Again, I haven't tried it, but I wouldn't rule out being able to pass deep color through the 990's DVI switching - after all, HDMI v1.3 is still built on DVI, it uses no additional video conductors to carry a deep color signal, and therefore the only hold-up would be bandwidth through the switch.

Thanks Gonk. The video is not a biggie since I can always go from player to display, bypassing the 990. So Oppo's player is going to play blue ray, dvd a, and sacd? I've been looking for that type of universal player without success for a while now.

I contacted tech support re DVI. Here is the response from Scott:

No, the Model 990's DVI output will not in any way degrade your picture quality.
Unfortunately, component video does not support 1080P (though all good component
switchers will support 1080i, including ours).
While the component video output will support the OSD, the Model 990's DVI
connection will not.

To clarify my earlier post, I asked Scott if model 990 can handle 1080p input from blue ray via dvi connection and out via second dvi connection to tv, without loosing any quality.

That's what we hear. When they announced the player at CEDIA, they weren't saying much about DVD-Audio except that the hardware will handle it and they were working with their chipset vendor to get the decoding included. Personally, I expect them to succeed in that. Blu-ray will include decoding of all new audio codecs, and DVD playback will benefit from the ABT technology that they used in the DV-983H .
Scott makes a couple good points - first that 1080p component is a mightily rare beast (as we'd already discussed) and second that the 990's DVI switching is wholly separate from the 990's OSD system. That means you'll need to switch over to an analog video connection (any of the 990's monitor outputs will do, including component) to see the processor's setup menu.

"Nope - there's no way for it to know or care that there's a DVI connector anywhere in the signal path, because it's nothing more than a pair of adapters that match up the different pin configurations. Seriously - going from HDMI to DVI for video is a passive and transparent process. The only thing that happens inside a DVI-to-HDMI adapter or cable is that the wires go to different shaped plugs. The same number of video wires pass through as would exist with DVI-to-DVI (single link) or HDMI-to-HDMI"

One nitpick with that. You do sacrifice a bit of your leeway on cable length by adding a conversion to DVI into the mix. The architecture of HDMI cabling as well as the shielding and difference in the transmit and receive chipsets make long cable runs (and to be clear, I am talking about 30' plus) a little more problematic than with an HDMI end to end run.

If you are looking a 6-10 foot runs between components and a TV, this is a non-issue.

Cable length most definitely is a potential issue. Wouldn't you see the same sort of risk in an HDMI switcher as well, though (unless that switcher included a signal booster of some sort, of course)?...