Video cards with HDMI, audio concerns?

EarthQuake

So i'm looking to get a cheap video card with native HDMI out so my Father In Law can watch netflix, hulu, etc on a TV from his PC. What i'm wondering if anyone has any experience getting the audio to work correctly from this sort of setup. Ideally we want the audio from his PC to work normally, and also to be sent out with the HDMI to make it easy to hook it up to his TV.

I was looking through reviews on newegg for this card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127412

and came accross this:

Cons: If you are looking to use the native HDMI port on this card you may have to go without sound. The internal SPDIF will only work with mother boards that have the matching pin size. If your pins are another size, (3 small unmarked pins on a header marked SPDIF) or the port is missing all together you will need the cable that connects to the external SPDIF port. (All of my desktops fall into one of the two categories.) They have a solution but they do not include it with this board, and a few of their other boards have the same issue. (The accessory information is not on the packaging, and the package inserts appear almost as if they were written for a different product.) They told me if I was willing to pay for shipping they would send me a free cable. (???) This is adding to the cost of the board. (No thanks I can make my own.)

So what i'm wondering is if this is typical, or if i should just try to find a different card. It looks like all i need to do is attach the wire to the pins on the mobo, which are pretty standard i though, like where you plug the cd-in from a cdrom drive or whatever.

Xoliul

Apart from that, keep in mind it's really annoying if you want to switch between HDMI sound and regular speakers, in terms of Windows settings.

EarthQuake

oh so you can't have both? Well shit, i might be better to just get a DVI-HDMI converter, and split the the audio out from the pc, to the speakers/tv.... The only reason i wanted the native HDMI on the card was to get audio without extra cables.

Xenobond

If you have a sound card in addition to an on board set you should be able to do it. I've got the onboard jacked into my desktop speakers, and the razer barracuda card/headphone set and going at the same time.

Had to use the fiber optic cable to get sound to tv as my mobo spdif & vid card weren't having the sex properly.

Filbot

Might be worth looking into Playon. Its well worth the money, I use it on my xbox to watch hulu, ted, etc. And with plugins for it you can stream live TV like sports games and stuff. The software interfaces with hulu, etc, via your TV so you don't need to setup anything on your PC to watch shows, aka it allows you to search hulu with your remote... Keep an eye out for the coupon codes, they run them alot and you can pick up the software for 19.99. Here is a list of devices it works with. The Netgear EVA2000 pretty cheap on [ame="http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-Digital-Entertainer-Live-Black/dp/B002HWRJXU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1262662895&sr=8-1"]amazon[/ame].

EarthQuake

We've decided to just roll with only sound from the TV, we'll see how it goes, hopefully that works.

zet

Whatever you do, don't do what I did.

I did also want to use HMDI and it lacked sound. The connectors on my motherboard lacked any description of the spdif pins (like + / - ). The graphic card lacked this info as well. After trying out to google for a proper description, consulting the mainboard manual etc. etc., I thought "how bad could it be?". I simply "tried" different combinations out during runtime.
I stopped "trying" when my graphic card started emitting smoke - luckily, the card still works. After that I continued using my VGA + Sound connectors. Annoying but better then buying new hardware...