Hi Eden,
Thanks for your input.
I finally got the whole issue sorted by upgrading the motherboard BIOS from v.F2 to v.F4. And updating all the Gigabyte motherboard (graphics,audio etc.) drivers from their website. I then updated the Blu-ray drives driver from v1.2 to the very latest v1.03.
Then I actually got it working, and got a blu-ray to play on my LCD TV! but only on the 40'' LCD
Now comes my two big issues and they are hardware issues :-
1) My Acer monitor is VGA and therefore of course is not HDCP compliant. Gutted, so I've ebayed it (at only a £28 loss, so not too bad) and bought a monitor with DVI HDCP compliant connection.
ACER P243Wd 24" wide format TFT Screen (2 ms) - By far the best monitor for the money!
2) So now then you'd assume I'm all good to go.... well no. As it turns out on the Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DS3H motherboard you can only use either DVI or HDMI at one time (I was going to have one monitor hooked up to the DVI and one with a DVI-HDMI adapter hooked up to the HDMI). As these are the 2 digital connections on the I/O at the rear you would need one for each monitor so that you are running 2 digital connections both with HDCP. This as I said is not possible to use both at the same time. So I have now had to purchase a dual DVI output graphics card.
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3650 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express)
Fully Blu-ray and HD-DVD compliant.
www.lambda-tek.com - £40.31 inc.VAT (cheaper than Overclockers and delivered next day, which was today!)
Make sure you look into Dual Video decoding capabilities for H.264, Mpeg-2 and VC-1, also get Cyberlink Blu-ray disc advisor which scans your system for blu-ray compatiblity.
I'm now at the stage where Ive got the set up working with desktop extended onto second monitor (my 40'' LCD), but when I drag the powerdvd window over to the second monitor the video image wont display in the powerdvd window, drag it back to monitor one and there it does display the video! A liitle niggle I'm going toi have to work out tonight.
So my suggestion to you is maybe not to go for this motherboard. One of the reasons I bought it was to save money by using its onboard graphics for my HTPC setup. Obviously now Ive had to buy a graphics card anyway, so my initial chice for motherboard may have been different had I know its limitations with the DVI-HDMI sockets on its I/O using the same channel.
Hope all this helps, let me know how you get on, fellow HTPC builder!