laptop digital output?
 

Hey guys, hoping someone can help me out here...

I've got a g4 powerbook that I love. It's hooked up to a 17" LCD monitor. I want to use it to watch movies on my hometheater system, which is powered by a denon receiver. Now, I can hook it up to the receiver with analog cables from the headphone jack, but that won't help me have Dobly Digital or DTS. Is there some sort of device (maybe connecting through USB or firewire) that will give me an optical digital output that will pass a dolby digital signal to my system? I'm sure there must be, but I don't know where to look. Thanks for the help.

ive seen pcmcia with optical outs. havent seen a usb one yet, firewire probably has one though as its fast enough

Sound Blaster exitigy will do just this. It's not on the cheap side though.

Just bought myself a sound blaster extigy 2 today. Spectacular. It should do everything that you need.

Back when I had a PC, I put the original audigy platinum card in it. It worked really well and had a lot of inputs and outputs, including optical and coax digital. However, it didn't pass along a dolby digital or dts track. I don't know where the problem was. This extigy should be able to do this? I don't want to spend a bunch of money just to find out that it doesn't do the most important part.

check Creative's web site for info. Dolby 5.1 and DTS require a chipset for on the fly decoding and encoding and i know some audigy's had it while some did not. Like i said, very not cheap.
I'd suspect that they make both an exitigy and something like an exitgy+ that has the optical outpt and dts chipset.
Good luck.