Setting up surround to work with all of my devices

[mindlesslegion]

Thank you to everyone in advance who has input or helps out.

I have a Sceptre 50" LED TV (http/www.amazon.com/Sceptre-X508BV-FHD-50-Inch-1080p-Black/dp/B008BQGPOU) and a Samsung Blu-ray 5.1 home theater system (http/www.amazon.com/Samsung-HT-EM35-Channel-Theater-System/dp/B00AN5VE20). I currently have the home theater system set up and everything is working great. I get 5.1 surround as long as I am using the blu-ray player. However when I bought it I planned to use it to have 5.1 surround from all my devices. My TV has three HDMI and I currently have the Comcast HD cable box plugged into HDMI 1, the Samsung blu-ray plugged into HDMI 2, and an HDMI splitter (http/www.amazon.com/Portta-PET0301S-HDMI-Switcher-Support/dp/B00B46XUQU/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1392857006&sr=1-1&keywords=hdmi+splitter) plugged into HDMI 3. Plugged into spot one of the splitter I have my custom built desktop PC(I can provide GPU details if needed but I don't think they will be relevant). Plugged into spot two of the splitter is my Xbox 360 with Kinect and no hard drive and plugged into spot 3 of my splitter is my older model Xbox 360 elite with a hard drive and no kinect.

Now that all the details you may or may not need are out of the way.. I had planned to plug the blu-ray player into my TV through HDMI and plug in an optical audio cable as well from the blu-ray to the TV. Then plug everything else into the TV and have my audio from the TV be picked up by the blu-ray home theater system and sent to my surround sound speakers. After my optical audio cable arrived in the mail today I realized my TV has no optical audio port to plug in from the blu-ray (I had just assumed it would). Now I'm wondering if there is any way to set up my surround so that I can get 5.1 surround from all my devices when I'm using them in a way that supports it? I have seen adapters and such but wasn't sure if there was any port on my TV that I could use an adapter to that would still maintain the true 5.1 sound. If there is absolutely no way to use the surround successfully with my current setup I will most likely return the TV and get something else. I do really like the TV however and would really prefer to keep it. Please let me know if anyone has an idea or proven method of setup that will let me keep the TV and use the surround sound for all my devices. Thank you.

EDIT: I see now in the manual that my TV has "1 output x SPDIF (digital audio) out". What is the difference in this and the optical audio out TOSlink? Could it be used to connect to my blu-ray player?

 

[ssddx]

there are two types of spdif outputs

spdif coaxial (coax)
spdif optical (somtimes called toslink)

with that said, is your tv capable of outputting 5.1 from that port? in some cases they are limited to stereo only.

the other way is to connect sources up to the receiver (in the case of a htib set its the dvd box with the speaker connections on the back of it) however they are often quite limited and sometimes dont support surround sound from input sources (sounds silly but some models are like that). generally this is why we dont care for htib (home theater in a box) sets much.

as far as if your equipment works or not... you will have to test that out.

if your tv can definitely output 5.1 from spdif and if your htib accepts this input as 5.1 then all should work well. if not.. well you might have trouble.

test some things out and get back to us.

 

[mindlesslegion]

The TV manual says that the SPDIF digital coax port is for surround sound. My TV has the coaxial port and my blu-ray home theater has an optical port. I just ordered this coax to optical converter (http/www.amazon.com/C2G-40018-Coaxial-Optical-Converter/dp/B0002J2MV4/ref=pd_ybh_1). I will use it to plug the TV coax spdif into the blu-ray optical. I'll let you know when it arrives if it works out. Thank you for your help.