I've been one of many people to discuss HDMI's various versions at great length over the last couple years (as my HDMI FAQ will attest). In recent months, I've been hearing talk of a new wrinkle in the latest version. Tom Norton has recently weighed in on this new twist in this Ultimate AV column .

Here's an overview of the article. HDMI v1.3 players exist, but they don't do the one thing that most people expected them to do: pass a bitstream of Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio. As it turns out, there are three players on the market today that employ HDMI v1.3 transmitter chips. Those three are the Playstation 3, the Samsumg BD-P1200, and the Toshiba HD-A20. None of these offer hardware that can pass a bitstream of TrueHD or DTS-HD MA (and man do we need a shorter name for DTS-HD MA). There are apparently some new HDMI v1.3 transmitter chips available that can support a TrueHD or DTS-HD MA bitstream, but they appear to be too new to have made it to market in any products.

This is one reason that implementing HDMI v1.3 in a receiver or processor has got to be an exercise in frustration for manufacturers: there's not even a way to test the decoding of these new formats because there are no sources available that can deliver them to the receiver.