5)What is your favorite type of program material? Do you watch mostly DVD movies or are going to be using your home theater mostly for watching sports? Will you watch a lot of regular or HDTV in your theater? Do you even have a good HDTV feed into your home theater? Would you really enjoy watching concert DVDs or music videos? If this theater will be used primarily for watching movies, what is your favorite type, or genre, of motion picture? Large production, action movies have a different set of demands on your home theater system than do romance films, for example.

6)Do you have existing audio / video equipment you'd like to incorporate into your new theater? Should you? Some of your existing gear may work great or maybe you need to replace a piece or two. Maybe you're building everything from the beginning and need all new gear.

7)Are you going to be doing the installation yourself or contracting with a professional installer? What is your level of expertise in the building trades? Are you a fast learner?

8)Will this theater be used mostly by you, or will family and friends be using this room even when you're not around? If many people will be using the theater, consider investing in a really good remote control, and some programming to make everything really easy to use. You'll thank yourself later, and so will everyone else. It's very nice when the remote control is so simple that you can watch whatever you want by pressing one intuitively labeled button or icon that makes everything happen. With touch screen remote controls, the screen will change depending to reflect the appropriate source or task, so you have only the buttons displayed that you need, not a confusing jumble of buttons to control every conceivable function of your theater.