My suggestion is to call DirecTV support and tell them to send you a different brand HD receiver. Although the others are being discontinued, they apparently have replacement stock of RCA, Hughes, and Samsung...though I would not recommend the Samsung, for reasons that are stated below.
I recently tried to use several of the H10 receivers and had a multitude of problems - including the lack of a functional discrete power command, incompatibility of the Dolby Digital audio output with certain surround processors (some Adcom and other units), as well as compatibility with the component video outputs with component inputs on certain older equipment (for example, DWIN transcanner, even though the component outputs on a Sony DVD player work just fine.)
The discrete power commands are apparently supposed to work on the H10 remote like they do on the D10...which seems to require that one select a TV code first; however, despite trying various code combinations on the remote, I could never get the discrete power to work. I called DirecTV and they sent an identical replacement...which had identical problems...with the audio, video, and remote.
Regarding the audio problem, the Dolby Digital outputs only provided a useable signal on channels with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround with the processor I was using...other channels were mute on the digital outputs. (Analog RCA outputs were OK.) After repeated contact and hours of telephone conversation with higher levels of tech support, one upper-level tech finally acknowledged that there were known problems with the H10, including compatibility, and offered to send out an RCA DTC210 as a replacement.
The RCA DTC210 arrived and works flawlessly...it has discrete power (using the standard RCA command sets with the addition of a few HD functions), the digital audio works perfectly on ALL channels, the component video outputs present no compatibility problem with the DWIN or anything else I've tried it on. The unit has composite, component, S, RGB/VGA, and DVI video outputs and a lot of other useful features. The only thing it doesn't have is HDMI.
Unfortunately, this unit has supposedly been discontinued, due to DirecTV's new policy of becoming the sole source of equipment for DirecTV. I'm in the process of stocking up on these to have until DirecTV gets their problems resolved with the H10. What a shame...RCA finally gets it right, and DirecTV steps in. By the way, my understanding is that the H10 is manufactured only by Samsung, though RCA does provide certain other models. This makes some sense, as the Samsung HD receivers (160 and 360) had numerous problems, including similar digital audio problems.
One especially disappointing aspect of all this was the way the DirecTV tech support staff initially tried to BS me about the problem, telling me "that was the way it was supposed to work". One tech, after conferring with her supervisor, came back and said that the supervisor wanted to know if the analog RCA audio worked. When she relayed "Yes", he told her to tell me to "use the RCA jacks for audio on those channels" instead of the digital audio outputs. When I responded "Tell your supervisor that's a stupid suggestion! We didn't buy an HD receiver so we could use the analog audio." she laughed and said she agreed but "had to tell me what the supervisor told her to tell me." After much perseverance, I finally got escalated to a level at which they acknowledged the problem and provided a solution. Having installed hundreds of systems that used the digital audio outputs on a DSS receiver, I knew better...but I wonder how many naive consumers are not getting what they paid for, and are simply doing as they have been told by DirecTV support...to disconnect their digital audio, etc.
