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TiVo's main rival, SonicBlue, the maker of the ReplayTV digital video recorder, incurred the wrath of the television industry last year when it introduced a similar feature that lets users share recorded television programs with anyone on the Internet. TiVo says its system will keep programs within one household on machines that are registered to the same user.

At the show here, SonicBlue introduced a $249 device that will let people watch a DVD playing in one room on a television in another by way of a wireless network. Most other companies prevent their devices from making copies of recorded DVD's or sending them anywhere — to the next room or over the Internet — for fear of angering the movie studios, which do not like the prospect of the rampant file sharing that has afflicted the music industry.

Patrick Lo, chief executive of Netgear, a leading maker of home networking equipment, said that such concerns over copyrights were substantially slowing the development of home entertainment systems.

"The studios will not let us copy movies onto servers, and so we can't distribute them around the house," he said. "The media PC will not fly because without content, there is no reason to use it."

But that has not stopped manufacturers from introducing other devices that focus on music, and on personal photos and home videos, for which copyrights are not a problem. Last fall, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first computer to use Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition. The initial production of the machine, which was positioned as a premium home computer, sold out during the holiday shopping season.

Viewsonic, a rapidly growing maker of monitors, introduced two media-center PC models at the trade show with prices of $1,495 to $1,995. They are positioned more as home entertainment devices for use in the living room, even though they will run standard software.

"The box is for entertainment, and the PC is free," said the James Chu, Viewsonic's chief executive.

Rather than use Microsoft's system, Sony has its own Gigapocket software, which lets its Vaio personal computers record and play television programs. And it introduced a system called Room Link, which will wirelessly beam those recordings to a computer or television in another part of the house.

But Sony also introduced Cocoon, a set-top box, based on the Linux operating system, that records television programs and transmits them over a network.

Many of the major audio and video vendors also endorse the notion of stand-alone storage devices, rather than basing systems on PC's.

Samsung showed a Home AV Center, a tall silver box that looks like a compact stereo system. The device, which will sell for less than $1,000 when introduced by the end of this year, records standard and high-definition television programs on a hard drive and on recordable DVD discs, lets a television surf the Internet, plays music files, displays pictures and even displays caller ID numbers from incoming phone calls. It, too, transmits all this wirelessly around the house.

Thompson's RCA brand introduced a $699 Home Theater Jukebox, which focuses on recording and distributing downloaded music files. It does not record video, although it plays DVD's. Thompson says it is the first device that lets users download music to portable MP3 players without using a computer.

"The PC is not the center of the living room and home entertainment," said Charles Dehelly, Thompson's chief executive.

Indeed, as industry leaders debate the architecture of ideal home entertainment network, companies are introducing much more simple ways to link devices.

The show was filled with combination products, like digital cameras attached to cellphones, MP3 players or hand-held organizers. There were remote controls that surfed the Internet and wristwatches that were also walkie-talkies.

Sony and Panasonic introduced camcorders that record directly to DVD discs. And Sharp offered television sets that can display digital pictures directly off the memory cards used by digital cameras.

"Words like `server' scare people," said Bob Scaglione, a vice president of Sharp, referring to the file-sharing servers that act as the hubs of computer networks. "People want to do everything in their living rooms."

The less ambitious approaches may not have all the features of a universal wireless home entertainment network. But they are better than Scotch tape on the TV screen.