I am currently the owner of a Samsung UA22ES5000 TV which is a small (22") TV, probably the smallest Samsung TV made. Since I purchased this TV originally, it has almost exclusively been used as a PC monitor, without connecting the internal speakers for sound.
The TV has the following inputs: HDMI, VGA, component and composite video, analogue audio (RCA and minijack) and the following outputs: analogue and optical audio. The TV features the ability to rename these inputs, and somewhere along the way I chose to rename the HDMI input as "DVI PC" as that reflected what the input was being used for.
All was fine until I very recently signed on to a satellite TV service and connected the set top PVR to the TV using the HDMI input. My intention was that the sound from the PVR would come over the HDMI cable to the TV and then the speaker output from the TV would be connected to external speakers for better sound quality. This was done so that I didn't need to have switch boxes or other complications to connect the PVR to my existing sound system and would also enable me to have both the media PC and the PVR playing back both video and audio at the same time. (Last night I did in fact watch two programs simultaneously in this way, both of them were Hillsong Church broadcasts and I was able to keep track of both of them simultaneously :)
On doing the installation it was discovered that the TV would not produce sound from the HDMI input and although it is possible to run a separate sound cable to the minijack input (as would be the case if a computer was connected with a DVI cable), I preferred to use the HDMI cable, partly because I suspected the digital audio output would not work with the analogue audio input and partly because I wanted to be sure the TV was not actually faulty.
After going through every menu and setting and the instruction manual it appeared the only option I had was to try hard resetting the TV and after this was done and the initial setup procedure had been completed and the TV had retuned all the channels, the sound was working from the HDMI input.
But that still left the mystery of how the sound came to be turned off in the first place and as there was no clear setting or instructions I eventually Googled this and eventually found a thread on, of all places, the Ubuntu forums. Here it is.
The gist of this is that if you use the input rename feature of the TV and change the name of the HDMI input then it changes where it gets its audio signal from. In particular if you rename this input to "DVI PC" which is one of the preset names, then the sound comes from the DVI/PC minijack input and not from the HDMI input. If you leave the input at its default (no) name, then the sound comes from the HDMI input and not the DVI/PC minijack.
As I noted above there is no documentation of this feature by Samsung in the instruction manual for the TV and I had not had cause to use any of the audio inputs of the TV up to this point since it was connected to computers which had separate speakers. That has now changed as, not only is this the correct display to use with the PVR (which has TV type resolution settings like 1080p and 720i in its options, and not computer monitor resolutions like 1680x1050), we are also getting Shine TV on FreeviewHD in a few days time and I will also watch that channel on the TV. So it will be used as a TV for two channels, Shine TV and Hillsong Channel. And if I could really be bothered there are about 10 other Christian channels between the two signal sources
