Bluedelta - Milestone?

[shortbloke]

How does Bluedelta's miletstone products compare to Kat5. It appears to offer much the same functionality (correct me if I'm wrong here) including a hub to support single wire multidrop. Information on the milestone products is very limited.

http://www.bluedelta.co.uk/milestone_system.htm

Additional information I've managed to obtain indicates that this carries:
Composite Video, Stereo Audio, 5:4 or 16:9 switching, power to slave devices, and Infra Red return.

I can see the obvious difference is that kat5 uses s-video, whereas this is composite; however I'm not sure kat5 offers the ratio switching?

[katman]

Hi Shortbloke,

KAT5 can be used for either S-Video or Composite video.

It also has IR return and SCART control with full support for Aspect Ratio switching if the source supplies the correct 5v/12v signals and the TV supports this.

Full details here http://www.kat5.tv/modules.html

Hope that helps

Regards

Keith

[shortbloke]

Just thought I'd write a quick update on my experience with the BlueDelta Milestone products.

I went for 1 6 way smat scart transmitter which hooked up to various AV sources in my living room this was connected via CAT5 to a hub device in the loft which then dropped down to multiple cat5-> scart receiver adapters. The first one I hooked up to my 26" LCD TV. All looked very nice and neat. However for me it just didn't work. Picture quality was worse than RF, lines would appear across the screen. The Sky "Scan and Search" (I think that's what it's called) the vertical edges weren't straight. Anyway after much messing about and trying replacement kit, reducing the complexity to a single point->point connection all which made no difference at all, I gave up and got a refund.

[vex]

How close to power did any of the CAT5e did this end up running.

It sounds as through it is electrical interference and inductance that could have been the cause on to the un-sheilded CAT5e.

Chris

[shortbloke]

Hi Chris,

Yes I have used unshielded Cat 5e. In places it will be near mains wiring as reto-fitting this cable in my home and causing the least amount of repair work means that it will be within 5cm of mains wiring in a small number of places.

One of the other experiments I did to ensure this wasn't causing an issue was to hook the smart-scart transmitter directly to a scart received via a 0.5m patch lead and connect it directly to the TV in the living room. Even here the picture quality wasn't great, soft picture and non straight edges on the sky search and scan box.

Martin

[cverrier]

I have also tried the MILESTONE system, which seems to offer greater flexibility (multidrop via a little hub, etc).

BUT

Picture quality isn't good. I had horizontal shearing of the image on high contrast areas of the picture (Sky menus, and wherever there were sharp dark/bright boundries on the image), and complete loss of vertical hold when large amounts of white was on the screen. (My LCD TV just went blank until the white image went away!)

I also had TWO of the hubs fail, so no multidrop while they were replaced.

Picture quality on the KAT5 is WAY better. No artifacts. And this is on exactly the same cabling.


When KAT5 Mk3 turns up, the Milestone is going in the skip (Or maybe eBay!)