Audio/Video to HDTV

[Moohasha]

Hey guys, I'm hoping someone can help me out here. I used to use my 42" HDTV as my computer monitor in the living room. I ran video to the TV through a DVI-HDMI cable, and audio through a simple 3.5mm cable. That worked when the PC was right next to the TV, but now the PC is in the bed room and I've run all my cables through the wall to the TV (for Xbox and such), and I still want to extend my desktop to the TV so that we can stream videos and use my PC's BlueRay player to watch movies in the living room, but I don't want to run HDMI and 3.5mm through the wall. Is there a good solution to combine the video and audio from the PC into one cable to the TV? I've considered two options:

Option 1) DVI and Digital Audio to HDMI converter: This combines DVI and digital audio into a single HDMI stream. The benefit is that it ends up HDMI. The downside is the price. That one I linked to is $250. I've seen cheaper, but it's still an expensive option.

Option 2) DVI to Component + RCA Audio: The converts the DVI to component video (red/green/blue), and then I can get a simple converter from 3.5mm to RCA (red/white) audio. Then run all 5 through a 5-RCA cable to the TV. The benefits to this one are that it's way cheaper and I already have some of the parts. The dowside is that it's RCA component instead of HDMI, so I don't know how the quality is going to turn out.

If anyone has any better solutions, I'm all ears. Basically, I'd like to only run one cable from the bedroom to the TV (opposite sides of the same wall, so 6' of cable max) without spending an arm and a leg or degrading the quality too much.

[stealth977]

One solution is to have a graphics card with built in HDMI support. For example I use a ATI 4850 which has a DVI output which also outputs sound too. So, just a small DVI-to-HDMI converter (included in the box) I can use my 42" LCD TV as my computer monitor.

The downside is GPUs with HDMI support currently only support 5+1 sound output, so you cant get some 7+1 Digital sound out of them, but its still good enough for my home theater:)

ismail,

NOTE: Have you checked, maybe your GPU/DVI output is already supporting sound??

[Moohasha]

Wait, your video card support audio output through HDMI?? When did that start happening?

I haven't ordered my new computer yet. I'm going to be building it later this month (hopefully...just looked at the budget last night), but the video card I'm considering (Radeon 4870) does have HDMI out. I've never heard of video cards that carry audio as well as video.

[stealth977]

Well, then you are probably lucky since it should support HDMI output Those ATI cards have a pass-through system, pulling sound out of your soundcard and redirecting it to their HDMI/DVI port

ismail,

[subquantum]

Most of the newer NVIDIA cards support this, too. Both HDMI and DisplayPort support up to... eight? channels of audio.

(disclosure, I'm currently working at NV. Though, I didn't even know that the cards supported this until I saw the code for it in the driver :p )

[Moohasha]

That's...brilliant! I guess I'll wait until I get my new card and see if that works. Thanks guys, you may have just saved me a bit of money.