Cat5e will work fine for HDMI, and indeed, probably for anything you'd need in your house. That said, the primary expense in cabling is the labor, not the materials, so running Cat6 is generally not dramatically more expensive. I personally prefer to run Cat6 for future proofing, unless the cost is dramatically different. Cat6 is somewhat harder to work with and terminate properly than Cat5e is, so you'd want to make sure your installers are capable of doing it correctly. My multi-room TV solution is not the best you can do, but it works for us. I have coax and network run to each room with a TV, and a Tivo there. That allows me to watch live TV, and I can also watch recordings from any other Tivo in the house, as well as Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Hulu etc. I also have a file server that has some saved video and audio content on it. The Tivos can play that over the network from any room. And I have a blu-ray player in each room for playing discs. It's not what some would call a "whole house" solution, but it works really well for us. Yes, it would be more convenient to not have to put a disc in every time we want to watch a blu-ray. But the alternatives for that are either a pain or expensive (or both). The coolest way to go is something like Kaleidescape, which gives you a true whole-house movie library with no discs. But it's insanely expensive. You can rip your DVDs, but it's time consuming and most of the solutions for playing them back aren't that great in my opinion, especially if you have non-technical people using it (which is true for most of us, and even those of us who are technical don't necessarily want a challenge when we're kicking back to watch a movie). You could have a central disc player and distribute the video, but then that leaves you having to go there to put in the discs, and the only real benefit is that it saves you the cost of a player in each room. Blu-ray players are cheap. There are tons of things you can do, but I think a lot of it is overkill for most people. A Tivo and a disk player in each room with cable and network is a good way to go. Or even skip the disc player if you don't watch many discs.

I can vouch for the avsforum as that is where I was held by the hand to learn what I now know. I received some very valuable information through them on the operation of my DVR.

I looked into control 4 for my house, because I liked the idea of the system and that they purport it's cheaper than some of the other integrated system. For me, it didn't work that way, and my quote was around 30k for the stuff I wanted. Another thing I really didn't like about control4 was that you needed a service call from a reseller technician every time you want to change something about the system. I ended up going with a Legrand Unity system which does very similar stuff, albeit the touchscreen remote stuff isn't as cool, but I still have an LCD screen that integrates cameras, thermostat, intercom, and whole house audio. Speaker wise, I would say 2 speakers is what I would do for that size room, but speakers don't have to be expensive. I bought a variety of types, and settled on Polk 620RT, which look and sound very nice. That being said I bought some cheap Micca speakers off amazon and I think they sound really good; excellent for the price. I'm very happy with my Netgear Nighthawk AC router for $200 (or less on sale). Have them run one of those many cat 6's to two distributed places in the house and you'll be good. If you have to go w/more than 1 router and want it more integrated, I'd suggest Ubiquiti UniFi AC Enterprise WiFi System (on amazon). Cheaper than Luxul and I've heard very good things. -adam

The picture looks like hack handyman work. I can't believe he paid for that. What is all the 2x6 blocking for. That is ridiculous. You will NEVER be able to add anything in that wall again. Simply map out what you want on a virgin/clean floorplan. Your builder should be able to provide this to you with no problem. Then map out the elevation view of each wall you want to have a.v. and power for your equipment. Include measurements for both elevation and horizontal location of all of the box locations (power and av) and tv brackets on the wall elevations. Then install the appropriate rings and pull your cable. As stated before. If you want to go any distance (more than 50') with an HDMI signal, you will need to run cat5e or cat6 and install adapters at each end.