Surround sound output

When playing DVD's in my Computer's DVD player, should I be able to get surround sound?

I plan to connect the MoBo's HDMI to an AVReceiver for sound only, and display the movie on the Monitor through the GPU.

My system:
LG GH24 internal DVD R/RW
Mobo Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen3, with Realtek ALC892
Core i7 2700K (has iGPU HD3000)
NVidia GTX9800+, drives a LG Flatron W3000H display
Windows 7 64bit
AVReceiver with 7.1 surround sound speakers

Thanks!

Yep, although you need to make sure the audio data is passed to the receiver. Most people use a s/pdif. What sort of connection are you using?

ONLY if the signal is already encoded as Dolby/DTS OR if you have a soundcard that can do realtime conversion of uncompressed 5.1 to either format. Since most movies have one of a Dolby/DTS track, you should be able to get 5.1 via SPDIF, providing you set your media player of choice to send the compressed signal out, rather then decoding it.

I'd be shocked if it didn't.

PC games almost never have a Dolby/DTS track [Bioshock is the ONLY one I know of that does]; they use uncompressed PCM almost exclusivly. As a result, unless you have a soundcard with a realtime encoder to encode 5.1 PCM to either Dolby or DTS formats, you are limited to just 2.0 using SPDIF.

^^ ASUS cards ship with a Coax to Optical converter. They focused more on the Home Theatre crowd, where equipment with Coax is still more common then optical. The exact encoding capabilities vary a bit by card [the DS is DTS only, the DX is Dolby only, etc]

^^ Remember, you have 20+ years of receivers that used Coax instead of optical. As ASUS tends to lean toward the HT crowed, they use coax by default. Not a big deal either way though. Only complaint is the converter feels (ok, IS) a 10 cent peice of plastic.