TV & Surround sound

This evening I hooked up my mini to my Samsung TFT TV for the first time. The mini was switched off at a 1400*1050 resolution. It automatically adapted to the maximum resolution of the TV which is 1360*768. There is a lot of ghosting in the image. Big letters have shadows to their right side. Currently the mini is hooked up to the Samsung TV with a bad quality VGA cable. I will by a DVI to HDMI cable and hope the display gets better.

Spend a lot of frustrating time getting surround sound to work. The mini is optically connected to my surround receiver (NAD). There is no problem playing Dolby Digital or DTS sound, but AAC content is a problem. According to quicktime the AAC content has 6 channels but they arrive at the surround receiver in 2 channel stereo format. I read somewhere that this is normal, since the format used in AAC is not a format recognized by normal surround receivers. In this case the computer should create the six channel audio and send it to a surround receiver in six seperate audio channels. But the mini only has a two channel analog output. Adding a seperate (USB) soundcard with six seperate audio outputs to the mini seems to be the solution. Well, doesn't seem so important anymore. If my DVD's play with surround I'm happy.

It's just the HD movie trailers on the Apple site use AAC encoding so they will not play in surround format.