No Your Tv S Digital Out Does Not Do What You Think It Does  

It may let you play 2-channel stereo, which could then be turned into pseudo-surround by your receiver, but it will not give you 5.1 or 7.1 channel digital audio from those sources.  The digital output on 99.9%* of TVs is only for sending digital audio from their own internal tuners (fed by an over-the-air antenna) to the receiver.  If they pass through sound for other components at all (and some don't) it will be downconverted to 2 channel. 

Sorry.  Wish I had better news. 

Regards,

Joe

* P.S. I have see references to TVs that will pass-through sound from other components, but I've never seen one, encountered anyone who owns one or seen a verified link to such a thing.  Hence the "99.9%". I'm just doing a CYA in case there really is such a set somewhere.  :-)
 

UPDATE:

Some Vizio models from 2010 actually will pass multichannel digital via the optical or coax output, and it is possible that other manufacturers will follow suit.  But as of 9/202010 I'm not aware of any, and I don't know which specific models will do it. I know that you'll need to check on a set-by-set basis.  If you're mostly looking for this feature for ease of connections and to be able to just "watch TV" without firing up the whole sound system, I recommend going in the other direction.  My Yamaha receiver will pass audio from my other components via HDMI when in stand-by mode, drawing next to no power.  So for routine TV watching - news sitcoms, most dramss and a lot of sports, I rely on my (pretty good) TV speakers.