Many people have made the mistake of diving headlong into buying the latest piece of gadgetry before they know what they really want to do with it.

This has resulted in many people buying digital music playing systems and only having three or four songs to play on them, buying e-readers and not having any books downloaded, and having a DVD player but only a promotional DVD from the front of a magazine to preview the equipment.

If you are putting together a home theater, it is a good idea to know what you’re going to show on it, and have that in place.

Think of the following picture: you get the component parts of your home theater together and you go through a laborious installation process.

You put the final wire into the final socket, turn everything on and then realise – “All I have to watch on this is the news – or one of those DVDs I have already watched a million times“.

This is the fate that may await people who buy a 3D TV based on the preview they saw of one showing the latest Hollywood blockbuster, unaware that that movie is not commercially available in 3D.

You need to give the grand unveiling a sense of purpose, and perhaps buy a few DVDs in advance that will really show what the system can do.

The last thing you want when you have put time and money into putting together an entertainment system is a sense of anti-climax and scattered comments about how “weathery” the weather forecast looks on a giant screen.

As time goes on, the possibility of making your own movies has become something that is within the reach of most of us – even if without the backing of the major studios, you may lack something in terms of budget for stunts, actors and locations.

Furthermore it does mean that some films are made by people who would never have got the funding from a studio based on their talent; and as a result, the making of some movies that perhaps would have been better never being made.

A home theater is something that can help any budding Hitchcock. A cursory browse of YouTube will show that people are making films using their cell phones, webcams or other similarly low-powered equipment – and while these films may have some charm within the confines of YouTube it is hard to make them fly any further than that.

With a home theater it is possible to watch your own creations as they are being made and see them as you hope they will one day be seen – in glorious technicolor.

It is a fact that some films lose a little impact when they are released on DVD because, when watched on a normal TV screen, they lose something of what the director intended.

On a home theater screen you can see more, and with the right system you can hear more. This allows the budding director/producer to make something more involved and innovative, and has to be a good thing for the world of film.