HDMI is a crazy standard. After hooking up my AV receiver to my new LCD flat panel via HDMI, you would think that everything connected to my receiver would play perfectly, right? From my cablebox’s component output all the way down to my aging standard def digital recorder. Well, no go. The ONLY thing that will play is a device that is connected to the receiver via HDMI. So you have to also connect the TV to the component out on the receiver to watch all the other stuff! How freakin stoopid is that!
The other stupid thing is that HDMI only carries standard two-channel audio! Yeah, the state-of-the-art AV connection still requires you to hook up a separate digital audio cable to get surroundsound!!! To add insult to injury, if you do have both audio sources connected you’ll get a weird phasing between the TV audio and surroundsound audio due to a delay from (I’m guessing) the digital decoding.
At best HDMI is a half solution and just makes normal connections more confusing and idiotic. I suspect that DRM is at the heart of the problem, but that is just unacceptable.