After planning it for about 5 years, I've finally begun finishing my basement. The biggest part of the plan is to add a home theater and a bar. I'm still fairly early in the process, I have a few more weeks of framing work ahead of me (doing this nights/weekends when I'm not busy with work) but I'm trying to think up some automation ideas beyond the basic "turn off the lights when the movie starts". Any thoughts? I definitely have some time before I get to this phase of the project so I want to start thinking/budgeting!
My dream home theater would have:
- Dim lights on Play
- Bring up lights (slightly) on Pause (bathroom bread w/out tripping over everyone)
- Bring up lights all the way on Stop
- Warning LED above door outside when a movie is in progress ("Don't barge in, dummy!")
- Is screen a wall, or actual screen that may be raised/lowered? If so, auto screen roll down when AV equipment turned on, auto screen roll up when AV equipment turned off
- Could enable auto-Pause if door is opened when a movie is in progress, but might not necessarily always want that.
- I would die for some sort of popcorn machine automation!!
I'm more than a little jealous...can you tell? 
if you have a RPi, set up hyperion to add ambient lighting to your screen
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After a lot of thought, I've decided that a large TV is a better way to go over a screen. It's partly due to the layout of the room, and partly because 8k projectors start at about $15,000 and TVs are much more reasonable.
Ugh, can't mention this to my wife, she'll make me figure it out!
Hyperion seems interesting. I'm currently using Hue Sync, what would hyperion gain me over that?
We're chatting right now...we want options for both butter and cheese toppings, and some method for the machine to shake out the unpopped kernels at the end of the popping. 
Yup - the pricing is in the "Yikes!" territory right now. Big TV is going to be much more cost-effective. The only room we have that I could convert to a media room is currently being used as our home office, so I don't really have any good options for something like that now. My brother-in-law set up a media w/a 4K projector years ago and when we visited them I didn't want to leave. 
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If you have windows, run electricity to the windows so you can have electrical blinds to roll down when you start a movie. Same for the screen if you are going with a projector.
if you already have a solution then no need to change it, but hyperion would give ambient lighting for the tv, not the room as a whole. that's actually going to be my next project. no added benefit, just to add the color light behind the tv to help "extend" the screen
