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Video Chat Software Reviewed

Posted by michael on from the cu-see-me dept.

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.'"

3 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Re:requirements by Mikey-San · · Score: 4, Informative

    You've conveniently left out the fact that the 640x480 video stream you get from iChat, doubled with the nice audio quality, is better than GnomeMeeting's.

    --
    Mikey-San
    Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
  2. Got my iSight yesterday.. by droopus · · Score: 4, Informative

    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."
  3. Re:Right... by jtdubs · · Score: 5, Informative

    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