Apologies for the somewhat cryptic title. I have a notoriously old setup with a 10 year tv and a beasty 25-year old (!) Yamaha A2 amplifier. Up to some days ago, my needs in the living room were served by a (also old) AMD-based pc that was equipped with an optical output. Setup worked like a charm: video was sent to the Panasonic 50" plasma over HDMI and LE was configured to transcode anything multichannel to 5.1 DD (amp also is 5.1 DTS capable).
The rig went dead and was replaced with a rather cheap Dell optiplex 3050 ultra small form factor thingie, lovable to watch I migrated my LE setup to the new box and everything works perfectly (plus having a UEFI boot).
Problem is that it lacks an optical digital out. Luckily the Panasonic behemoth comes with an S/PDIF out which, at least, makes sure that I can get excellent audio ... albeit in stereo.
Now I'm certain that it is not doable, but have to ask: is there some sort of "magic" that can be used to send multichannel audio to the TV and have the TV just pass the audio to the amp. From what I've tested this does not work. Still, I'm asking just in case it can be made with some sort of tinkering.
For what this is worth, I'm looking into workaround. So far:
* buy some sort of HDMI splitter boxes that take HDMI and output both HDMI and S/PDIF: work but a bit pricey
* was looking into whether small form factor PCI cards with S/PDIF exist, until I found out that the Dell has no room for cards at all
* currently checking whether I can get a USB card that also has S/PDIF without spending a fortune
* will look whether there's some sort of Dolby ProLogic transcoder for Kodi exists: if it does I'll simply transcode everything multichannel to the special stereo signal for ProLogic.
Please free to suggest any inexpensive solutions (if any)