Bought a crappy DVD/5.1 home theater and I think I may be retarded.

Dr. Phibbs McAthey

Yeah, I know it's a piece of junk, but I just bought a Curtis DVD5091 DVD/5.1 surround home theater in a box thinger. I got it for $10 at work though, through clever abuse of employee-only coupons and rewards coupons. I've been using an old shelf system for sound and it's on its last legs and I figured, "Why not? It's gotta be better than what I've got." It's just a dvd player and the satellites and sub that hook up to the dvd player, which I had assumed functions as a receiver. I hope I am not totally wrong in that.
So I get this thing all set up and I realize I'm a total home audio/theater noob and can't even figure out, if I'm using this thing to try and get audio out of, say, my tv or my xbox, on these speakers, if I should hook up the audio cables to the audio out on my tv or audio in. Yeah. I know. I seemed like such a smart guy, too.
It also occurs to me that the standard red and white cables it came with for audio probably won't cut it. There is a digital out on the dvd player and I have a pretty nice hdtv with a digital audio jack. I have no idea what to do with those.

So basically help me do what I can to get this abysmal setup functional for gaming/Netflix Instant View on my 360. I can go into whatever specifics needed.

Bionic Monkey

Choose the "Audio Out" from your TV and plug it into the "Audio In" on the system. If you have several different inputs, you canvplug the audio from the Xbox directly into the system, but for ease of use, you may want to just have everything go through the TV first.

Dr. Phibbs McAthey

Ok, I have done so and after some more fiddling with the settings on the tv (set so that no volume comes from the tv and that the sound source is fixed), I am receiving audio from my speakers. New problem: The sound coming from them when on anything other than the dvd player is barely audible.

I guess it would help knowing that it's a Curtis DVD5091. Yes. Junk. But 100x better than what I had, assuming I can get the thing to do what I want it to.

Bionic Monkey

You might try diagramming what you have plugged in where. In my experience, getting sound that's barely audible means some other piece of equipment is trying to use the same channel.