DVI to HDMI plus audio in the same cable

Having the same problem... frustrating to have to connect up the headphone jack to the audio input on the TV...

The audio is embedded in the data packets that are sent on HDMI. It is not a separate physical wire in the HDMI cable. So, when you take a DVI output from the mac mini, it doesn't have the audio in it as per the DVI standard. There is no way to do this other than a separte audio link to the AV input of your TV. The more complicated way is to have a little box that takes the DVI data and the audio and creates a HMDI stream. Such a box will have to resolve whole lot of other engineering issues (lip-sync is one example) and the number of customers for such a product is very limited. Maybe there is already one such product out there. It has to comply to the content protection rules that govern any device that has HDMI output or input.

My TVs have a section in the user manual which describes this scenario of usage (i.e., connecting a computer to the TV) and has the audio fed thru the AV1. It is yet another wire at the back of my TV, but not a big deal for me.

I notice that BSteely has posted with a link listing the product I previously found and suggested in this message http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8001082#8001082 but failed to give credit.

However I will reiterate that mixing audio and video via an adapter to convert it to an HDMI cable only achieves a little bit of cable tidiness at a significant financial cost and no improvement whatsoever in quality of sound or picture. Remember TVs themselves cannot do 5.1 so you are only going to end up with the same Stereo that you would get with a simple and cheap mini-jack stereo lead.

Using the optical port on the back of your mini is the best way to transfer the audio if you have a receiver. I got a phono to HDMI chord at Microcenter for 15 bucks and it came with an optical adapter. It goes right into the HDMI port on the receiver. Sound is great. Then the DVI to HDMI for video goes to your TV HDMI. I had this same situation, and the receiver was the best solution. Problem was, once I got a decent receiver, I couldn't help myself and went and bought a 1500 dollar surround sound bar. That being said, I love my setup and it works great.

The audio signal needs to be "combined" with the video signal in order to use the HDMI cable to deliver both audio + video. There are devices on the market that do this combining / encoding but they aren't cheap: http://www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=3570