From what I have been gleening from the discussions via Mr. Doherty of Panasonic, Amir of Microsoft, and a gentleman from Sigma chips, and from various articles it looks like HDMI is it. In fact, both HD-DVD and the superior Blu-Ray's specs. were drawn up with HDMI in mind as Hollywood studios were more willing to accept the copy restrictions and encryption levels afforded by the HDMI consortium (ie, bad news for consumers).

Again, I suspect that bandwidth limited lossy formats like regular DTS and regular Dolby Digital, as well as stereo PCM up to 24/96 resolution will be allowed on toslink and coaxial as it is now. That's all the 990 would be good for anyway.

7.1 analog-out with all processing done in the player or HDMI will be the only way to get high resolution video and audio out of HD-DVD or Blu-Ray players. DVI with HDCP may or may not be included for video only transmission depending on the final video specs for both formats (you have to downsample certain color spacing requirements and other features using DVI since it is not as advanced as the newest HDMI specs.).

And this is where the 990 falls quite short... unless, of course, Outlaw will be designing something akin to the well received higher end Anthem pre-amp for their upper tier unit that will be HD-DVD and Blu-Ray capable and fully hardware and software upgradeable with premium audiophile parts.

Unless you really, really want PLIIx (the only really big difference between the 990 and 950) I would suggest waiting a little bit to see what these blue laser discs have in store for us.

That's another question: is the DVI switching function in the 990 fully HDCP compatible?