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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.'"
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."
"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
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
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.