I want to play Blu Ray movies with a PC Blu Ray player and I want a video card with an HDMI output to send this to the HDMI input on my TV. Is this doable while retaining the quality of picture? And audio, I seem to remember reading audio is transmitted through the HDMI output to the TV, but is this surround sound and how do I get that to my surround sound system? Would I need to get a surround sound audio card with an audio coax to plug into the surround sound system? I realize I can do all this simpler by using a stand-alone Blu Ray player but I'm thinking about the long term aspects, particularly the laser LED in the player. Whichever type of player I go with - stand-alone or PC Blu Ray player - eventually the laser LED is going to burn out and I'll have to buy another player. The PC players are much cheaper. See where I'm coming from? I just hate waste. And it's a lot more waste throwing out a $150 stand-alone than a $50 PC Blu Ray player. In case someone is asking "Why not replace the laser LED?". Well, it's because the darn things are super expensive unless you are a manufacturer buying tens of thousands at a time. Thanks to any and all who reply.

The problem with HDMI is HDCP (High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection). Its basicly a form of DRM that is intented to stop digital HD content from being copied. As far as I know linux OSes dont have full HDCP support, so you cant play a bluray disc on a linux system and pass it striaght to tthe TV etc.. Im not aware of any current workaround for playing bluray with linux. That doesnt mean they dont exist, just I dont know of them.

As its DRM and there are some pretty nasty laws about cracking DRM, you probably wont get any more detailed info here.

Its also possibly to rip bluray and then play it (though HDMI or DVI/VGA + audio). Again, due to some insane laws and the rules here at LQ, you probably wont get any more info on that either.

Sorry.

You _might_ be able to play bluray though DVI/VGA with the sound being routed though an audio or SPDIF cable. Havent ever really checked, bluray is about as high on my list of important things as buying frilly underwear for alpacas.

As far as the sound goes, with video cards with full HDMI support, the audio is passed from the sound card, through the HDMI output to your TV. If you want to have the sound go to an amp, it will need to be passed from the TV to the amp (or, in some cases, you can go HDMI ouptut-> amp-> TV).

If your current sound card doesnt support 4.1/5.1/6.1/7.1 sound and is an old 2 channel only card, you wont get multichannel sound.

HDMI can stream both video and audio signals, so you should be good with just an HDMI cable between your TV set and your PC.
You have another issue, however: there are no protected-content Blu-Ray players for Linux out there and the vast majority of Blu-Ray discs are protected by either AACS or BD+ technologies. You can find some level of support to AACS decryption with libaacs (you need to manually find the key, however) but nothing with BD+, ATM.
You can, however, extract Blu-Ray contents without re-encoding (thus maintaining Blu-Ray quality) using commercially available tools even on Linux.

Thanks for the informative replies, I have more focus now. I looked at the user manual for my newest PC motherboard and it does indeed have 5.1 sound, so at least I'm good there. I found a reasonably priced PCI video card (Nvidia chip, of course) at NewEgg that has HDMI output. 25 feet is a safe distance to run the cable so I'm good there too. But it's a shame about Linux not having the capability to handle HDCP. I'm curious to know if Microsoft Windows has the same problem. Not that I want to use Windows, I'd rather do without than use Windows.
@ 414N, by "commercially available tools" do you mean external drives connected to the PC? Or do you mean proprietary software? I ask because I don't relish the thought of buying software. I like open source software that can be examined (not that I myself can do that) to ensure certain undesirable actions are not being performed on my machine without my consent, such as periodic checks for updates that also pass along private information like where I've surfed the net, how many emails I send, etc. I'm old and paranoid that way. But I digress. Thank you, gentlemen.

Be aware that a video card with HDMI output usually contains its own sound card, so your integrated sound card inside the motherboard would not be used altogether in this case.
It's highly unlikely that Linux will ever have some kind of HDCP support, as it's one kind of DRM system that can't be circumvented out of DMCA fears. You can read more about it on wikipedia and more about DRMs in general as seen from the FSF POV here.
I was meaning "proprietary software", as there can't be a widespread open-source/free software unlicensed implementations of AACS/BD+ decryption because of, guess what , DMCA.

PCI? I hope you mean PCIe.

nVidia and ATI/AMD cards will work with HDMI. If you are building a mediab box, the nVidia cards are probabyl what I would get, they work better with hardware video decoding than the ATI/AMD card (the only reason why I say 'probably' is because IMO the ATI/AMD cards have better image quality).

Windwos does have HDCP support. Its not prefect, there can be issues with it.

HDMI video cards actually tend to have a sound controller in them, not a sound card. The sound controller wont actually crete any sounds, it will just pass though sounds from a real sound card/chip.

I *think* as far as blu-ray goes, the sound can be simply bitstreamed/passed through without decoding if the video card and/or sound card supports that feature. If you want to play blu-rays with DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby True-HD you need this feature (though in most cases you can drop back to DD 5.1 or DTS).