I have a 6.1 home theater system with a Sony amplifier and, among other things, a DVD player. It's old and does not play some MPEG4 videos that use newer codecs. Rather than buying a new DVD player and running into some sort of similar problem in the future, I want to replace it with a laptop. Some laptops, such as Dell D600, have a S-video output plus headphone output. I can feed these into my amplifier, but I want to do better than that. I would prefer digital rather than analog output, just like I now have with my DVD. What are my options? I probably need some sort of special audio/video laptop card. Do such cards exist? Is there a better solution? Thanks much.
Laptops normaly don't have digital out for audio I am sure theres some out there but by the time you buy one it would prob be cheaper to replace your dvd player with a newer model or just deal with the analog stero output.