Just bought a Philips BluRay player BDP3406. I will be using it with a Samsung Plasma HDTV which will be my main home 'hi-fi' ( using the term loosely!!) system. The Blueray connects to the HDTV via HDMI, and the TV will output audio thru an optical cable to a couple of powered monitors.

I currently have a large collection of FLACs stored on DVD (and hard drive) and want to figure out how I can best play them back thru the BluRay player. The player has a USB port to read media files via a flash drive or external hard drive.

However, the BluRay is quite limited in the file formats it can read, the manual suggests only:

AVI, DIVX, MP4, MKV - as well as MP3, WMA, and WAV...

I'm assuming this thing should be capable of streaming pristine digital audio to the TV via the HDMI port, so I'm thinking that if I converted my flacs to one of the new BluRay audio formats, then it should probably pass thru the TV in good shape. But maybe its kind of overkill, converting FLAC album to a video with chapters, and writing it to DVD as some kind of video to play back?

Can I make the MKV container conveniently hold some kind of lossless "HDTV" audio stream, and thus have it play back "natively"? It seems that the BluRay player's analogue WMA playback is limited to 192Kbps, so lossless WMA playback is not an option. I'm basically wanting to trick the blueRay playing into giving me some lossless audio output, with any kind of file conversion short of just dumping the FLACs back out to WAV again. Or is WAV going to be as small as any of the other "HD" audio streams anyway??

All this fiddling just so I don't have to drag my computer downstairs every time I want to play some music...