Finishing basement: need advice!

Hi, I am also in the process of finishing my basement, and creating a home theater area. I decided to hire a professional to deal with the home theater stuff, eventually got him down to the deal I wanted to make, within my budget. Any way if I was going to do it myself, I would just check to make sure what connections my projector has and how many connections there are. Then I would decide what I would actually hook up to the projector. Since you are using a Home theater in a box, I would just say to just get all the possible connection cables to the projector so if you changed your mind and wanted to add something to your setup you could, cables aren't that expensive. If you are drywalling your ceiling then it would be a big pain to add cables later on. as far as the HDMI, I believe 50 ft is the max length before quality of signal really diminishes, and even 50 ft may be pushing it a bit. I believe you should keep the HDMI cable as short as you possibly can with some slack, for better signal quality, as well as the latest released spec of HDMI released which is v 1.4 I believe, some even have ethernet abilities. My recommendation would be to not really use a home theater in a box, and instead opt for a proper home theater receiver. You don't need to get the top of the line one, just a good one. The home theater reciever is like the brain of your whole system, and then you would only need the one HDMI cable to run to you projector, and maybe the pc monitor cable if the receiver didn't have that input available, and if you wanted to hook up your pc to the projector. The difficult part for you right now is needing to know what you really want to do with your system right now and possibly in the future, and then accommodate those needs accordingly. Hope that helps somewhat, good luck with your project.

Forgot to mention that the home theater in a box question only takes care of the audio source, it does nothing with video other than it's own blu ray, unless it has some hdmi inputs, then it should pass the video signal through with audio coming from the home theater system, you should check your owners manual on the capabilities of your system. you can also pass through the entire blu ray signal, meaning audio and video to another receiver I believe, but you would have to check your owners manual. Basically with home theaters in a box, what you do is this, say you have cable tv. You get an optical audio cable/coaxial audio cable, depends which your cable box supports, and connect that to your home theater in a box system, that way you get the audio to play through the system instead of the tv/projector. to get the video for the cable you take either composite/component/HDMI and connect that from the cable box to the the tv/projector. Then you go into the setup feature for your cable box and tell it to output your audio through the optical/coaxial cable out.
this way you get your audio to play through the home theater in a box