HDMI woes

Factual Questions
1

I had an older friend ask me for assistance with his Home Theater. I sold HD TV’s and other electronics for a big box store for a couple of years and am fairly knowledgeable in the setup of Home Theater. Have a nice theater setup myself. But I’m stymied.

Here’s the situation. He’s got a Toshiba 50 inch LCD TV, an Onkyo 506 receiver, and a blue-ray player (forgot the brand). He had it all professionally installed and has worked well, but the DVD player suddenly “stopped working”. No picture or sound on the tv. I checked the connections first, and then verified that the appropriate inputs were selected based on the connections I saw. My observations of what was the proper selection matched his previous use. But no picture.

The BD/DVD player and the HD Sat receiver run into the receiver, both on HDMI. A single HDMI runs out to the TV. I bypassed the receiver and connected the DVD player to the TV and it worked fine. Player works, check. Traded the HDMI cable he previously had from DVD to Receiver with the one I just used (and know works). No signal. It’s not a bad cable.

Next I checked to make sure that the HDMI input on the receiver was assigned to the correct video selector switch. Didn’t fix it. Well, maybe its a bad input… So I tried both of the open HDMI inputs and assigned them accordingly. No luck.

So I know the player works. I know the HDMI cables are good. I know the receiver is passing the HD signal through from the Sattelite (through HDMI). My only guess is what they call a “handshake” problem with the DVD player and the TV. Something to do with not recognizing a HDMI compliant device. But it stopped working abruptly. Was previously working fine for quite some time. Any thoughts?

2

Does the player work with both DVD’s and Blu-rays? If it works with DVD’s but not blu-rays, it’s possible that the reciever is not HDCP compliant and will not pass a signal because of that.

3

This might be it. Some bluray players connect to the internet to update their software. That update can include new lists of which devices are properly HDMI compliant, which could explain why there’s suddenly a problem when everything was working before.

4

I had a similar experience. The issue we had was the Blu-Ray player was networked and set up to auto-update when available, and the television was not.

After days of headscratching, I finally figured that out, updated the television, and everything worked perfectly.