Hi

Please bare with while a less than technically minded person tries to explain the issue.

My blu ray 2.1 player is hooked up to my Virgin HD box by an optical cable and the Virgin HD box WAS hooked up to my Panasonic Viera TV by an HDMI cable. The simple setup meant that I could magically watch blu ray on my TV with the added bonus of the audio from programmes on Virgin Media also coming through the blu ray players speakers. I don't know how it all worked but it did.

Anyway, my parents 9 or 10 year old tiny Sony tv recently became damaged resulting in a 1 inch square of black pixels. I offered them my panasonic Viera to use until they can afford a new one, so for the time being I now have my parents tiny damaged Sony, which is fine as I don't get much time to watch much tv at the moment. However I would still like to watch a blu ray movie now and again while I wait for the return of my old telly, which could be few months.

So to the point: I now have the exact same cable setup, but with this old Sony contraption instead of my Viera, but it's like my blu ray player doesn't exist.
Does anyone know why this could be? I just cant figure it out! This Sony might be old, but it's not a CRT. Why wont the blu ray transmission reach the telly?

Thanks for any help

There is no way on earth that you were watching Blu-Rays using ONLY the cable set up you have described.

Firstly the optical cable is audio only. It cannot and does not carry video information. Secondly the optical cable carries audio FROM the Virgin box TO the Blu-Ray, which I assume is actually an all in one home cinema system of some sort. So the signal is travelling the wrong way anyway.

Therefore you must have had a HDMI cable from the Blu-Ray to the TV as that is the only possible way it could work. Obviously this HDMI connection has not been restored when you changed TVs. So you need to put it back to watch Blu-Rays, assuming the temporary TV has more than one HDMI, other wise that starts to get messy and you either have to keep swapping cables round or use a HDMI switch.

Hi. Thanks for replying. Ok I've obviously gotten confused somewhere and not made sense of my setup. Like I said, im less than technically minded.

So the optical cable delivers sound from the Virgin box to my blu ray speaker system. Well that makes sense. I seem to remember ages ago asking the experts how to get audio from Virgin broadcasts to play through external speakers rather than only blu ray coming through the speakers. For the life of me though, I don't remember more than one HDMI cable going into the TV, but obviously I must have then.

Sadly this old Sony does only have 1 HDMI input, so I guess ill just keep swapping cables for a little while.

It's a long shot, but were you ever a member of another forum that was cinema related? I only ask because your user name is very familiar.