Sorry for not replying back sooner - have been away for a week or so...

You're getting the blue screen between SD and HD cos your box's output resolution is set to auto in picture settings. Change it to 1080i and that will get rid of the problem.

Cheers

Dave.

I actually thought about this and changed it but evidently forgot to save the setting changes in the SkyHD options and assumed it wasn't playing properly! It is now working as expected. Although it does beg another question - does it it make any difference having the box set to 1080 when my telly is supposed to be 720?

DD 5.1 is not available via HDMI, only via the optical output on the box. The reason being 90%+ of sky boxes are plugged straight into stereo TVs and not HDMI recievers. TVs dont have the hardware to downmix 5.1 to 2.0, so HDMI is limited to PCM stereo audio only.

Ahhh - makes sense... but wouldn't it be possible to be able to switch it like you can on the optical output?

interesting, i will look into this

Me too!

Leave it on 1080, using 720 on the sky box will introduce to much image scaling which reduces image quality for HD. Your TV has a far better scaler than the sky HD box. you TV will have a higher resolution than 720P, so with this in mind.

Sky HD is transmitted at 1080i, so with sky set to,

HD

1080i=TV converts image to native TV res from 1080i

720P=Sky box converts image to 720P resolution, then TV will upscale this to its native res with loss of detail.

SD

1080i=Sky box upscales 576i image to 1080i, TV downscales back to native res.

720P=Sky box upscales 576i image to 720P, TV upscales to native res.

Auto=Sky box deinterlaces the picture and passes it to the TV at 576P resolution where its upscaled by the TV.

I have my box set to auto, and live with the delay when HD/SD switching. The reason for this, is SD requires overscan, whereas HD doesnt and on my TV you can switch overscan on/off for the different modes. With your box set to 1080i, and watching say bloomberg news channel if you cannot see a border around the onscreen graphics then your TV is overscanning HD. Overscanning HD is bad, because not only are you are losing the edge of the picture, but you have lost the 1:1 pixel mapping required to get the best image. This is why I sold my old LG TV, because it couldnt switch off overscan entirely for a HD image source.