Quote Originally Posted by mroy View Post
If I buy a DVD player that also has this capability then how do the devices determine which one handles the decoding?
Assuming you are talking about Blu-ray (DVD players do hot have HD Audio), in the Blu-ray player's setup menu you can configure whether to pass the bitstream as-is, or whether to decode it and pass uncompressed PCM instead. HDMI cannot pass both at the same time.