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.'"

Comments

sounds like more bloat.

[tenshioboe]

Adding features does not necessarily increase functionality -- it just makes the manuals thicker.

Re:sounds like more bloat.

[DaemonGem]

I can't agree more. 99% of the people I talk to on chat don't even know how to change their passwords. In numerous cases I've had to explain to them how. Simplicity is definitely valued more by the normal layperson than are features. I have seen people turn down Trillian because "it is too complicated". I think most people would love to have such a simple chat client.

Now, if we could only tell all those people that Apple exists.

-Dae

Re:sounds like more bloat.

[vought]

Simplicity is definitely valued more by the normal layperson than are features. I have seen people turn down Trillian because "it is too complicated". I think most people would love to have such a simple chat client.

I would rewrite this passage this way:

Simplicity is judged a valuable attribute by the normal layperson, but people buy features.

Put another way, simplicity is seen as a sophistication in and of itself, and is therefore desirable, but the average Joe pounding down CA Highway 41 in a Ford F250 doesn't buy simplicity - he or she buys 'features' that will 'make computing easier'. And they buy all this at a place where they can get the "Best Buy". S

Here's a laugh: Microsoft bills Windows XP as a fully color managed operating system, and insists XP works as well as a Mac for, say, fine art photographic interpretation.

You ever see fine art photographs on the wall in a BRIGHT SCREAMING RED AND BLUE frame - with the wall behind the print painted in still more primary colors? Me niether - and there's a reason why. Apple chooses to 'frame' documents in more subtle and understated silvery-neutral tones. Unlike Windows, where you have to create your own middle-grey desktop (uh, sorry, Wallpaper) pattern, Apple eincludes one by default. You can even turn off the traffic signal-colored windows controls with a single click. That's thoughful simplicity.

Windows XP is a terrible environment (by default, mind you) for using Photoshop or any other piece of software where you'd be expected to make careful color and tonality judgements on screen.

Does the Average User(TM) know that, or care? No and no. So the features (NEW, COLORFUL THREE-DEE WINDOWS THAT LOOK RENDERED BUT AREN'T!) sell more copies of XP while subtly increasing the number of elements that make color and tonal adjustments more difficult.

If Apple gave up on simplicity and built what everyone on Slashdot wanted (A $500.00 Mac OS X on x86 box with six expansion slots, ten drive bays, an Athlon64, a 400W power supply and an M+M dispenser on the front) the people who DO buy Macs faithfully every 30 months would leave in droves. The thing about simplicity is that it is incredibly tough to do properly. Simplicity done Microsoft's way = sparse.

Based on the PC market, you might say that about 3-5% of the people with computers value and purchase simplicity.

gnomemeeting?

[lethalwp]

too bad they did not compared it to gnomemeeting

an open source h323 soft compatible with netmeeting for all *nix, but dunno if it is still with msn6, would be nice to check this :)

duh

[edrugtrader]

of course MSN product is better... they are already on version 6! iChatAV doesn't even HAVE a version number! silly mac freaks.

Quote of the year

[GrenDel Fuego]

You can download them free at messenger.msn.com or apple.com/ichat, respectively, as part of a public beta test - a software company's way of saying, "Sure they're buggy, but what do you want for free?"

I believe I hear the sounds of a pissed off Gnu.

Smileys

[dk.r*nger]

Messenger 6.0 has a puking emoticon.

'nuff said.

Comments on the Article

[rjstanford]

The new features of Messenger 6 include custom window backgrounds and interactive games like checkers; iChat AV is dedicated solely to communication.

This point, like the one the editor made, is what defines it to me. Do you want to play? Get MSN. Do you want to communicate? Get iChat. There are times and places for both of these activities.

It's a little disconcerting, too, that video-chat partners seem to avoid eye contact. No matter how close you put the camera to the screen, it's impossible to look at both simultaneously. Everybody comes across as weirdly inattentive.

As those of you who saw Jobs' keynote Monday will already have guessed, this was a prime requirement for the iSight camera that Apple released -- designed to attach to the various displays Apple has released. Looking at the pictures on the NYT site (yeah, registration, ooh, scary), there's a massive difference in the way that the people using the two apps look -- one that you wouldn't necessarily click to from just reading the text.

And because Apple has the luxury of manufacturing "the whole widget," as Steve Jobs often says - the hardware and software, the computer and camera - there's no configuration. The instant you plug in the camera, it's ready to work, without any wizards or setup.

This is true, as it stands, but misleading. As they point out elsewhere in the text, iChat works as well on any FireWire camera, such as pretty much all modern camcorders, etc. This has more to do with using an established graphics communication protocol over a generic bus like USB than who manufactures the hardware.

Re:Comments on the Article

[rjstanford]

Since you couldn't just, you know, SIT YOUR CAMERA ON TOP OF YOUR FRIGGING MONITOR!!!! The little Apple camera hoobajoob is cool, but Jobs made it sound like it was physically impossible to put a camera on top of a monitor until the glorious miracle of iSight.

Well, if you have a flatscreen (like most of Apple's monitors for the last few years), or a laptop ... er ... then yes, it is prety difficult to just, as you say, "SIT YOUR CAMERA ON TOP OF YOUR FRIGGING[sic] MONITOR". So this was not a meaningless feature for most Apple users, who were in fact the targetted audience for this product.

That, and its a damned nice little camera, too.

Re:blah blah blah

[Mononoke]

If anyone uses the word "elegant" when describing Apple products again, I swear I'm going to get a gun and shoot someone.

Well, they wore out 'beleaguered'.

Re:usability?

[glwtta]

WTF? That's like saying that this years new sport car models are great, but there are still many places in the world that don't have roads, so the engineers should be paving them instead of designing cars.

These people do video chat software, codecs and networking are all great, but not everybody has to be doing that. Besides, there is plenty of broadband to go around, just because everyone doesn't have it doesn't mean those that shouldn't be able to take advantage of it. (seriously, how many things are there that everyone has?)

Manuals?

[RatBastard]

Manuals? Have you actually purchased a Microsoft product in the last ten years? You don't get any manuals. You get a "quick start" booklet and a cyanide capsule and that's it.

Re:Right...

[Pxtl]

Personally, all I care is when someone will make a voice-chat system that stands a rats-chance in hell of making it passed a basic router, much less a firewall. I'm sorry, but when I can play UT against people in and out of the University but I can't voice chat with them, there's something wrong there. At the very least keep it on one or two ports so its possible to plan around it and forward it, instead of running up and down half of the upper ports like some do.

Needed feature

[thelandp]

But which one comes with the best auto-airbrushing feature? Many slashdot readers will no doubt need this.

Re:gnomemeeting? (warning - kinda long)

[Mikey-San]

Right:

"Installation of Gnomemeeting is easy once you have the right version for your specific distribution of Linux! Here at PowerPage, we followed the simple directions:

4. Software installation
4.1. Which libraries do I need to run it?

You will need :

* the standard Gnome libraries (they are now optional in recent GnomeMeeting versions, but we recommend using them to have the full-featured GnomeMeeting).
* the OpenH323 and the PWlib libraries (See download section of this website).
* the OpenLDAP library (Included in your distribution)
* the SDL library (Included in your distribution). Having SDL is optional, but if you compile GnomeMeeting without SDL, the fullscreen feature will be unavailable.
* the Quicknet telephony development files (Provided with your kernel). Having those files is optional, but if you compile GnomeMeeting without Quicknet support, it will be impossible to use Quicknet hardware during calls.

4.2. How can I compile GnomeMeeting?

Simply use the binaries from your distribution, the ones in the downloads section, or compile that way:

As root, follow the steps :
4.2.1. Compile PWlib

You have to compile PWlib that way:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make optshared
$ make install

If you want to compile Firewire support into PWlib, you have to pass either the --enable-firewiredc or --enable-firewireavc to the configure script. Notice that executing the configure script will generate a ptbuildopts.h file that will be placed in the include/ subdirectory of the pwlib sources. If you want to benefit from the callto URLs, P_LDAP must be defined and set to 1 in that file. Similarly, P_HAS_IPV6 must be defined and set to 1 if you want to be able to use IPv6 with GnomeMeeting.
4.2.2. Compile OpenH323

You have to compile OpenH323 that way:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr
$ make optshared
$ make install

If you have any problem, please have a look at openh323 FAQ. You can also mail the GnomeMeeting mailing list.
4.2.3. Compile Gnomemeeting

Download it in the download section of the GnomeMeeting websit.

run the ./configure script, it supports several parameters:

--prefix=/usr to install it in /usr

--with-ptlib-includes= specifies the location of PTlib headers (for example,/opt/pwlib/include/ptlib if you extracted PWlib in /opt, default is /usr/include/ptlib)

--with-openh323-includes= specifies the location of OpenH323 headers

If OpenH323 and PWlib are correctly installed (both the libraries and the headers), we suggest you to compile GnomeMeeting that way:

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
$ make
$ make install

We at the PowerPage were disappointed to see the installation instructions for iChat and MSN Messenger 6:

1. Download iChat if you're using OS X; download MSN Messenger 6 if you're using Windows.

2. Double-click the file you downloaded and click the 'install' button to begin the installation.

3. Double-click the program's icon to run it and sign on."

Give me a break. If they would have compared Gnomemeeting, it would have been trounced. Why? Because this wasn't an article geared toward people who like--or even know /how/--to compile programs and configure things from the command-line.

There goes another Slashdotter who just doesn't understand which software is geared toward which people. We don't /all/ like ./make and ./configure, dude. Sometimes, people just want shit to work.

Re:requirements

[Mikey-San]

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.

Got my iSight yesterday..

[droopus]

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.

picture of ichat av

[ptorrone]

here is a picture of an ichat av session, this was before i got the isight (today) it worked fine with my cannon dv cam:

http://www.flashenabled.com/nimages/ichatbg.jpg

it works great, full screen and super-simple. msn 6 and ichat both do im, but msn is on version 6 with lots of features that many people need, or want while apple is starting out for the most part and many people don't need app sharing, white board, etc...it's pretty exciting. i use a mac and a pc so i've got the best of both.

cheers,
pt

Re:Useful?

[jolyonr]

I guess it depends on the size of the breasts of the person at the other end.

I was talked into getting iSight, but it's nice...

[berniecase]

My girlfriend went on and on about how she wanted an iSight. Last night I broke down and went with her to pick one up. It's a pretty sweet device. On our LAN here, we have no problems doing 2mbps video. Chatting with a couple friends, we've been able to do up to 160kbps. Still, not bad.

Earlier, I took my older Pismo PowerBook into the back yard and had an audio chat with her, while getting video from the iSight attached to her PowerMac. 700-800kbps there. Not bad at all. My audio stream going to here was 30kbps.

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*.

*All original ideas are the property of me. Boo yeah, grandma. I thought of it first, and so on... ;-)

were we reading the same article?

[Schlemphfer]

From the parent post:

From the article it appears they both work equally well so the deciding factor will have to be...features.

No, the deciding factor will have to be...video quality.

Here's what Pogue's article says about the Microsoft product:

If both conversation partners have high-speed Internet connections or are on the same office network, Messenger's video looks very good. You have only three size choices for the video - small, smaller or microscopic - but it's bona fide video. [Also, Pogue goes onto say that the MS product gets bogged down if you're connecting through a router]

And here's what Pogue's article says about Apple's product:

Apple, on the other hand, would sooner die than release anything that could be described as "stuttering" or "microscopic." In iChat AV, video is as crisp, clear, bright and smooth as television (640 by 480 pixels), in a window as small as a Triscuit or as big as your screen.

As you can see, video quality for the Apple product is incomparably better. The whole point of this video chat stuff is great quality video, and it appears that Apple is the only one offering high quality video at the moment. Unless you're content to look at triscuits ;)

Re:Functionality

[jeffehobbs]

Simplicity is for those people who can't program their own VCR. Duh!

You know, that's a great metaphor for linux UI in general -- as most humans agree that programming a VCR is stupidly and unnecessarily hard. Even with VCR+ or VCR Gold or on-screen programming or *whatever*, I've never seen a VCR timer that didn't inherently make life hard for the user.

Compare this to tivo -- on tivo, you press one button, you can browse listings, you can search listings, you hit the record button and that's it. Much better human interface design and product engineering -- and as a result, they can charge for it!

I'd love to see linux become viable for more users, but until the "Simplicity is stoopid, and you are so stoopid" mentality is violently overthrown, linux will remain a decent server platform and a desktop also-ran.

~jeff

iChat AV is so simply easy to use!

[Hackie_Chan]

I used to fool around with iChat during the release of Jaguar. Didn't use it that much because most of my friends didn't have AIM-accounts. But it's changing now... AOL/ICQ have recently merged their networks, so now i can use iChat to chat with my ICQ friends (only of they use the latest ICQ-lite though).

And I think Steve Jobs described Video-conferencing pretty accurately. It's one of those features that you go "I will never use this. It's cool. But I will never use this." and then after some use you will go "Why did I say that? THIS IS GREAT!".

You know what? Steve Jobs was completely right! iChat is now my favorite chatting application because of it's sleek interface, ease of use and audio/video capabilities. I just plugged in my webcamera and iChat AV booted up automatically and configured itself! How is that for plug and play, Microsoft? No drivers, no nothing. It simply worked. Set up in less than ten seconds. I am stumped!

"Way to go Apple!" is what I say! This will completely change how I communicate with my father that reside in the US. We've emailed and called back and forth for six years now, but now it looks like we're taking a step further to the future!

But what really need to happen is interconnect-ability between all apps though :(

Re:Right...

[jtdubs]

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