Personal technology columnist Rob Pegoraro filed a few tidbits over the weekend on what he saw at CES:

Copyright Misstep?: Remember the broadcast flag scheme for digital TV broadcasts that I've been yammering about for so long? I got a fresh example of why it's so odious in one proposed copy-restriction system developed to enforce the flag. This "Video Content Protection System," developed for use on DVD+RW media by Philips and HP, would lock discs to make them usable only on "trusted players." In other words, all those millions of existing DVD players will be unable to read these "protected" discs.

Wow, what a fantastic feature that will be. Thanks, guys!

DVD Formats: On Saturday, the CES show daily carried a story on the pointless format war between two proposed high-definition DVD standards, Blu-Ray and HD DVD. The piece reported that executives with the Digital Entertainment Group, a DVD-focused trade association, and Best Buy had called for the backers of these two formats to work harder to come up with a unified format.

By the way, in case you were wondering where the name "Blu-Ray" came from, it refers to the blue laser used to read these discs. A press handout explains why "blue" is misspelled: "The character 'e' is intentionally left out because a daily-used term can't be registered as a trademark."

I should note that both Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats allow for the possibility of hybrid discs that would work in existing DVD players -- something I think an absolute must, given the huge number of them in service. But neither camp talks this up as a core feature, or even one that will be implemented on any releases at all. Can't these guys learn how to play this game?

Speaking of format wars, the three-way fight over recordable DVD versions -- DVD-RW, DVD+RW, DVD-RAM -- has been settled on one device. An LG model supports all three of those rewriteable discs, meaning there's no chance of bringing the wrong disc home to make a recording on.

Head's Up For Satellite TV Subscribers: Both DirecTV and Dish Networks, the two major satellite services, announced plans to carry local stations' high-definition broadcasts, something that's not possible with the bandwidth of their current systems. To make room for these extra signals, each company plans to shift to a more efficient video format, MPEG-4.

DirecTV owners who recently purchased -- at considerable expense -- high-definition hardware from the service may have reason to be nervous. The network plans to begin these broadcasts in the Washington area, along with 11 other markets, by mid-year, but has yet to clarify if current HD subscribers will need to upgrade their hardware if they're content with current broadcasts.

Dish Network, meanwhile, says it plans a slower transition, with local HD signals not being carried until the end of the year and no forced upgrades for owners of existing hardware.

Two Steps Forward by Microsoft: Two fascinating devices shown at the Microsoft keynote, which I later had the chance to inspect up close: an LG DVD recorder and a flat-panel HDTV by newcomer Digitrex that used Microsoft's Windows Media software to play and display your PC's music and photos over a home network. Both devices represent a departure from Microsoft's normally computer-focused approach. Instead of trying to sell people a separate computer for the living room (like a Media Center PCs), or a separate computer peripheral for their living room (like the Media Center Extender), it's trying to build the necessary software and features into the devices people already put in their living room. I think that makes a lot more sense.

One other interesting initiative on display at Microsoft's exhibit was the Microsoft TV Foundation, a layer of software that cable operators can add to their set-top boxes. The version running on a TV -- what Comcast offers in the Seattle area -- offers a clean, refined interface (certainly much better looking than Comcast's usual program guide) that presents TV schedules, basic news and weather reports and even some simple games.

Sony Connect Update: At Sony's booth, I had an interesting chat about the company's Connect music service with vice president for content development Ty Braswell. He noted how the store now sells "instant live" sets, recorded at concerts and put on sale soon after. Then he suggested that the next step would be to make the recordings available even closer to real-time -- if you show up at the club with a WiFi device, why not have the recording streamed right to that?

Of course, Sony's service has to get some traction in the market first. The company is planning a renewed marketing push, complete with some updated music players that (finally) play MP3 files as well as Sony's own ATRAC3 format. But it isn't changing the onerous usage restrictions that turned me off of Connect.

Schilling at the Joystick: The graphics-hardware firm Nvidia's booth had an unusual guest Saturday afternoon -- Red Sox pitcher (and noted EverQuest fan) Curt Schilling. Schilling and his son Gehrig sat down in front of a pair of computers and played EverQuest II together, chatting back and forth and coaching each other as they battled monsters -- sometimes unsuccessfully. At one point, after the younger Schilling's character had met his demise yet again, his dad leaned over, laughed, and said "you're terrible!" It was good to get a reminder of the ultimate point of all this technology.

Editor's Note: Rob discussed HDTV issues in greater detail in his Fast Forward column for the newspaper and in his weekly Personal Tech e-letter. He'll be online at 2 p.m. ET today to answer reader questions about his trip to CES.

Rob Pegoraro and Leslie Walker both talk about CES in their Sunday newspaper columns.

In Fast Forward, Rob says the manufacturers of high-tech television sets are finally putting out affordable models. The bad news, he says, is that the industry continues to release "competing technologies, each with its own quirks for consumers to grasp." Read his column: "Waiting for a TV Technology to Inherit the Future."

Rob will be online on Monday at 2 p.m. ET to answer reader questions about CES. The Web chat page is here.

In Web Watch, Leslie Walker says real Web video is getting closer to reality. CES, she writes, saw company after company announce new Internet video services. Read her column: "Internet Video Adds Cable Programming."

I'm Yuki Noguchi, here with Robert Pepper, the chief of policy development for the Federal Communications Commission. It's his job to monitor new technology trends and advise the FCC on the intersection of new technology and policy. He agreed to sit down with us and describe some of the cool products he's seen at CES because, to be honest, it's not really possible for one person to cover more than 10 percent of the entire floor in any given day. You can also tune into an audio-blog posting where he shared more insights from the show.

Yuki: Let's go by category here, just to manage an otherwise massive selection of things to talk about. What's different about this year's HDTVs that are so the rage here?

Robert: It's not so much what's different this year, it's that there are more of them, from small flat panel LCDs to fabulous 70-inch plasma displays ... and the prices are coming down so everyone can find an affordable model.

Yuki: What's the most exciting thing you've seen here? When will it be available, and how much would you be willing to pay for it?

Robert: New improved wireless technologies that will connect everything in the home ... even through walls and floors ... so you can connect all of your TVs, computers, digital recorders and even your digital camera. Different companies are using different technology approaches and some are here today at prices not too different from what today's WiFi costs.

Yuki: OK, name the most bizarre thing you won't be buying, assuming it ever makes it to market?

Robert: The thumping Humvee with the 22-inch subwoofer.

Yuki: What, is the size or the volume that bothers you?

Robert: The THUMP.

Yuki: Much has been made of the way devices are now interconnecting with each other over all kinds of networks, including cellular, WiFi, Bluetooth, ultrawideband ... does that pose any regulatory challenge for you and the FCC?

Robert: The challenges may be more technical than regulatory -- making sure that interference doesn't make all these devices useless. We have rules about interference, but the industries have to implement them and make sure that all of their devices work together and don't interfere to the point that they don't work. They obviously have strong incentives to make sure that happens.

Yuki: Other observations about how these changes -- the interconnectivity of all things -- are changing industry?

Robert: The next VoIP [the first VoIP is Voice over Internet Protocol] ... video-over-IP or IPTV. A number of companies are developing different flavors of IPTV ... from SBC working with Microsoft to compete with cable TV companies to little start-ups that have devices you plug your cable into and then you can watch your local TV stations anywhere in the world over the Internet.

Yuki: Do you really think those things will happen, and when?

Robert: They are coming out of the labs and are beginning to be deployed now. This is something to watch over the next 12 months or so to see how real they are or whether they're not ready for primetime.

[Click here to listen to Noguchi and Pepper discuss WiFi and the hassles of getting around the world's biggest tech expo.]

Over on the reader feedback page, Yuki Noguchi signs off with some final postings.

"People warned me that CES would be a madhouse," Noguchi writes. "They told me to allow for 30 minutes to an hour to get from booth to booth. And it's true, traffic was so bad everywhere in Las Vegas that it made Washington DC gridlock look smooth."

Read more of her responses to readers here.

At XM Satellite Radio's booth, a white Scion and yellow Corvette sported the Washington company's new MyFi, the portable satellite radio receiver that launched in December.

"Oh, cool," a guy behind me said of the gadget that's about the size of handheld. And he wasn't talking about the cars. At this show, cars are merely accessories to show off radio and sound systems, not the other way around

The MyFi, which normally sells for $349, was offered at a special price of $199 to convention-goers. With a notable lack of good swag on the floor (compared with previous years, I'm told), the MyFi deal qualified as one of the biggest scores of the show.

The cars used at the show, by the way, had to be driven in through the back door of the convention hall, with next to no gas in them, according to Vicki Stearn, spokeswoman for iBiquity. The Columbia company rolled a BMW, a Toyota SUV and a Scion into its display in the hectic days before the show. "It was such an unbelievable nightmare," Stearn said.

But after all the hassles, conventioneers had a chance to test the quality of conventional AM/FM radio against iBiquity's digitized version. The effect? CD quality sound. The company is selling its software to broadcasters upgrading their systems to compete with all the other digital music offerings out there. So far, 21 of the 25 biggest radio broadcasting companies agreed to do such an upgrade, according to Stearn. But the changes won't be immediate. Give the broadcasters a couple of years, she said.

I'm not one to covet mobile media, but the handheld video player that caught my eye here was the Aviah, made by Ovideon. Its tiny, 2.2-inch screen surprised me with its sharp video. The bright display comes from its (sorry for the buzzword) OLED screen (short for organic light-emitting display.)

You can rotate its screen 90 degrees without losing clarity. This palm-sized toy has a TV tuner to pull in live TV, a 5 gigabyte hard drive for storing lots of video, and a built-in voice recorder, too. (Click here for a version of this posting with a photo of the Aviah.)

But hey, I'm not willing to part with $600 for the Aviah just yet.

One measure of what's hot is who's trying to piggyback. By that measure, the Apple iPod music player and satellite radio must be on fire.

By the time I walked the second vast CES hall, I stopped counting how many companies are here peddling accessories to satellite radio or the iPod.

George Wilson of Oakland, Calif., stopped by a gearmaker's booth to play with a portable satellite radio boombox and wound up falling in love with the Sirius Satellite Radio service it is built to play. (Click here for a version of this posting with a photo of Wilson checking out a Sirius receiver.)

"Not that I listen to that much radio," Wilson said, "but I really like the fact that you don't have all the restrictions of the FCC telling us what you can do and say on the radio."

Wilson said he's almost ready to sign up for Sirius or XM Satellite Radio, as did many other folks I chatted with here.

And when I bumped into Winfired Laasch, a television editor from Germany's 3sat TV service, and asked what was the coolest thing he'd seen, he didn't hesitate.

"Satellite radio," Laasch said, adding that he envied Americans because Germany doesn't have it yet.

Both satellite radio firms rolled out new stuff here. Sirius touted a bunch of new radio receivers and tuners, along with plans to deliver video over its network next year.

XM, the leader with 3.2 million subscribers, also announced a new lineup of portable radio receivers. It touted new talk hosts coming soon to XM, including Dr. Laura Schlessinger and G. Gordon Liddy. And speaking of accessories, XM talked up a new "connect and play" standard designed to make XM more compatible with other audio devices.

One gee-whiz product on display last night in the ballroom of the MGM Grand Casino signaled where the personal publishing trend known as blogging is headed.

Think video. Think regular Joes and Marys acting like Dan Rather, broadcasting personal video newscasts from their kitchen counters and living room sofas.

Vlog It, a new video-creation software program, helps people create a video blog or "vlog" with TV-quality graphics, transitions and titles. Users type in text, picking from pre-designed templates and then talk away in front of their computer or laptop, looking directly at a Web cam attached their monitor. The software records them, compresses and formats the video, and then automatically arranges fancy overlays and transitions. When done, bloggers upload their resulting video file to a blogging Web site. (Click here for a version of this posting that has a photo of Vlog It in action.)

"Video blogging is personal version of newscasts, documentaries and even Reality TV," said Mark Randall, founder of Serious Magic (www.seriousmagic.com), the Folsom, Calif. company that created the software. "We try to make you look good."

The results were impressive, partly because the company already makes professional video-editing software for the TV industry. The VLog It program goes on sale in four weeks at $100, Randall said. (Here's a link to Serious Magic's Vlog site.)

Motorola strategy guy Richard Nottenburg told me the big change for the cell phone maker is that it's listening better to what customers want. A year ago the company had a bad rep for ugly, clunky phones, and "it wasn't just that -- we were slow, unresponsive, with spotty execution," he said. But under new management, the company's coming up with slimmer, hipper phones like the Razr, a new phone sporting a trim physique. Now, with the pending merger between major customer Nextel with Sprint, Motorola is keeping close tabs on what both companies' customers want, he said. (Listen to our audio interview.)

Every now and then the gear-heads make a product for the rest of us. I saw one last night at a media reception filled wiith mostly me-too products. Called "Singing Coach," this software program aims to help people learn to sing in key, even if they're tone deaf.

The software is deceptively simple, relying on an animated microphone named Mike and various cartoon singers to teach you about pitch, tempo and the basics of music.

But its behind-the-scenes technology is sophisticated. The software reads your voice -- it pegged me as a tenor based on my humming as high and low as I could into a microphone--and generates a visual drawing of your pitch on a computer screen in real time as you sing pre-loaded songs.

A color-coded pitch line tracks your performance, spiking up and down above the proper pitch line as you sing. It lets you see how you're doing as you go -- and rates your vocal performance on a score of 1 to 100 afterward. (Click here for a version of this posting that has a photo of Singing Coach in use.)

"When you hum and see you are way off the blue line, you say, 'Hey, I've got to do something about that.'" said Ken Spiegel, chief operating officer of Carry-A-Tune Technologies, the Tampa, Fla. firm that created the software. "You learn how changes in your biology -- what you do with your breathing and posture and throat -- will affect your pitch."

It remains to be seen if Singing Coach can get me close to those elusive pitch lines, of course.

The software went on sale in Fry's Electronics stores a few weeks ago and is available online at www.carryatune.com. The company also is in talks with other major retailers to sell the product, which costs $50 for the standard version and $100 for additional features and recording capabilities.