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Video Chat Software Reviewed
Ryan writes "The PowerPage by way of The New York Times has a comparison of Apple's new iChatAV and Microsoft's MSN Messenger 6. My favorite quote, 'Microsoft, true to tradition, has focused on expanding its list of features, while Apple has worked toward elegance and simplicity.'"
Seriously, how hard is it do this, and find this?
Do not read this sig.
I recently had the opportunity to try both GnomeMeeting and iChat AV. These remarks are only for audio, though.
GnomeMeeting has an impressive feature list and it's adherence to open standards is naturally very appealing.
However, when comparing it to beta iChat the differences were planet-sized. Apple has created a wonderful UI; I could concentrate on communication, not on the software itself.
It is true that GnomeMeeting allows you to use different codecs and is slightly more hacker-friendly. However, when I want to talk to someone, I usually don't feel like configuring loads of stuff. In some cases ease of use simply blows features away, and human communication is one of them.
(Not to mention the sound quality of the iChat audio chat. Wow.)
[ Antti Rasinen ]
Another thing that should be noted is iChatAV requires at least a 600mhz machine in order to send video. While GnomeMeeting and others run on much less powerful hardware.
I was amazed..I expected to wait months.
The camera is absolutely amazing. About the size of a long C cell, the quality blows away any USB cam I've ever seen, and looks better than my camcorder as well. The whole iChat/iSight experience is, as Apple promised, beyond simple. Download iChat AV (had it already) plug in the camera, and off you go...well at least to the other two people I know who have iChat AV installed.
Well there had to be a caveat, eh? Forget about it if you have a slow Mac. I first hooked it to a dual 500mhz G4, and with bandwidth limits off, the thing bogged down my machine like nothing I had ever seen. I had to do a pushbutton restart twice.
Then I tried it on my daughter's 1ghz 17" iMac. Perfect. Flawless. I was having chats with people at 600kbps and it was like television on the other side, or so I was told.
Back to the dual 500, but with bandwidth limited to 200kbps. Now it works fine, but the moral here is that Apple is not telling all about processor requirements. To be honest, anything less than an 800mhz G4 is going to choke without the bandwidth limiter.
Yeah other cams are cheaper and there aren't many people to communicate with yet. But the difference between this type of chat and generic AIM is, forgive the cliche, paradigm changing.
I ordered two more iSight's today.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
My whole company (50+ employees) uses Messenger - it's much less intrusive than walking into someone's office and saying "Hey, got a minute?" We use it for communication that isn't important enough that you need to have a record of it (email), and isn't important enough for face to face contact.
Also, we have a couple of development locations, so it's great for when you need to have a conversation with someone not near you.
it works with most any firewire digital cameras... be them "webcams" or a digital camcorder with firewire output..... this is not like some webcam that updates every 60 seconds, it's streaming... and if you watch the demo of Job talking to somebody in France..... it looks darn good. USB cameras lack the quality.
that being said, most computers have microphones and using the full duplex audio chat has been repeatedly compared to cell phone quality. you can also do one sided video chats... so make friends with somebody the lives someplace neat, or is neat to look at and get them to buy a firewire camera.
this is still a beta and the final version will be in 10.3 when it ships, and there will be a full version for 10.2.x (for a fee i think?).
as for the Apple iSight webcam, considering most firewire webcams seem to be *about* $100, this is not too bad. it's seriously tiny, comes with a travel case (for laptop users) and a few stands to either sit atop a laptop screen, or other situations. Their justification for this was that if you are video conferencing with somebody, you want the camera right on the screen so it looks like you are talking to them, as opposed to a nice profile, or where ever other webcams often get stuck (think mine fell behind my desk... dustbunnycam)
My cheap as hell webcam works fine for streaming video. The quality is decent. And there is still nothing stopping me from going out and buying an awsome digital camcorder or firewire webcam and using that.
But to force it on someone is just bad business.
And what is all this crap about "mucking around" with the OS???
Both of my webcams are USB, they provide 30 fps of 320x240 video. (they can do 640x480 but most connections have a hard time uploading that) I got them, plugged them in, Windows made a little beeping sound and said, "your new hardware has been installed".
I was then able to access all of my video sources, that is 2 webcams, a tv tuner card, and a screen capture program (camtasia) from windows netmeeting, logitech's software (one of the webcams isn't a logitech but is selectable), the deinterlacer/scaler program dscaler, and virtualdub.
OMFG!!! Look!!! All my video sources were accesible from a MS product, a third party product, AND EVEN 2 SOURCEFORGE, OPENSOURCE PROJECTS!!!! Who would-a-thunk it???
"Messenger 6, in its ultimate form, will be free; iChat AV will cost $30 (but will be free with Apple's next operating-system release, Mac OS X 10.3, code-named Panther, due by year's end).".
Vote for Pedro
I'm not entirely sure how Apple does this, but apparently someone with Ethereal discovered the voice data travels through an AOL server.
karma: ouch!
A friend and I have iChat AV. We are in separate states, each behind our own OpenBSD based firewalls. Only a few specific ports like 22 (ssh) and 80 (web) are tunneled through.
I fired up iChat AV, and so did he. I saw the little phone button next to his name, so I pressed it. It connected and we started talking. Working great. No port forwarding.
IIRC, the audio stream is sent right inside the instant messager packets so as long as you can instant message, you can use voice.
I'll break out tcpdump and check it out sometime. No hurry though, cause it works great...
Justin Dubs
It's just like iPod. Apple recommends that you should use it with a Mac, however, other MP3 players WILL work with Mac as well.
iChat communicates through port 5298.
How do I know this? Well it told me, and took me to my firewall pref pane so I could click Add and let it through. That's simplicity.
All in all, it's a sweet device. I need to make more Mac friends. It's only a matter of time before there's an iChat AV videochat directory*.
Didn't take too long, did it? http://www.myisight.com/
Video wasn't a feature of NetMeeting until version 2.0, which was released in December 1996.
A year previously, in December 1995, Apple released QuickTime Conferencing, a standards-based videoconferencing suite for Macs. It didn't catch on, presumably because there were few users with fat network connections needed to support its features: audio and video chat, shared whiteboard, support for the H.320 ISDN videoconferencing standard used in businesses at the time.
Of course, people forget that Microsoft Excel was written for the Mac, and ported to Windows, as well...