Okay, so it wasn’t the cable.
It appears my Philips DVP-5990 DVD player is simply incompatible with my Monoprice 4×1 HDMI switch. I finally did get everything working by connecting my DVR & Blu-Ray player to the switch and the DVD player separately to the receiver. That’s not how I wanted to do it, but at least it works. I do wish I had paid more mind to the naysayers ranting about the limitation of 2 HDMI ports on the Yamaha 663 though. I may very well get a new receiver within the next year, because this switch business is quite annoying.
The Blu-Ray player is quite nice though, moreso for the lossless audio than the HD picture, sadly. I still haven’t really been blown away by anything HD. It seems that one simply needs HD to get a picture close to what SD is like on a smaller TV, it’s like this big scam on everyone. I suppose I could say that the differences between an upconverted DVD and a Blu-Ray are subtle at best. I also suppose I could say that the improvement is worth the $200 I spent on the player, but it certainly wouldn’t have been worth $300 or even the $450 that most of the standalone players cost. The improvement being worth $200 is a bit sketchy though, especially that I spent most of that $100 I saved on those damned HDMI cables and switch.
It’s just my little technological struggle… which I’d rather deal with than being social.