drfsupercenter said:

Oh, so if it's a 5.1 track, it gets downsampled to 2.0?

No it doesn't get downsampled. V8000 is incapable of decoding AC3. All it can do is play one of the other soundtracks on the disc, either stereo/matrixed PCM or analog mono.

drfsupercenter said:

What are those other things on the back that look like coax mixed with RCA? Is that some sort of obsolete video thing?

I guess you must be referring to the BNC jacks for sync signals in and out. They don't carry a video signal proper, only timing pulses.
In a professional environment where you might have several LD players under computer control (through the DB-15 serial port on the rear panel) you'd connect those BNC sync ports on all the players in daisy-chain fashion, keeping their respective video output signals in perfect synchronisation.
If you've got several players driving a single monitor that allows you to switch between them seamlessly. Or, if you've several players each driving its own monitor they won't drift out of sync with each other.

While LD-V8000 uses BNC ports only for sync signals, there are a few players that use BNC port for video output. Less noise than a yellow RCA video plug. (Because of its physical dimensions RCA plug can only approach 75 Ohms.) Among them are HLD-X0 and I think also LD-V4400.
reave, are you listening?