Apple introduced yet another reason to go Ten Forward yesterday,
iChat AV. It's a beta,
and it's free through the end of the year. iChat AV add voice chat and
video chat to the traditional text chat. It requires Mac OS X
10.2.5 or later, and you need a broadband connection if you want to use
the video.
The problem is, it may not work right away, as I and some online
friends discovered yesterday. The question was why wasn't it working
for audio and video. Or, more precisely for one person on my buddy
list, why he could connect to some people and not to others.
It took some fiddling around to determine that my Belkin 802.11b
router has a firewall that apparently can't be disabled. Fortunately it
also has a "DMZ" setting that can allow one computer on the network to
appear outside the firewall - and that's what finally allowed me to use
the audio portion of iChat.
The next step was to borrow my wife's ADS Pyro 1394 FireWire webcam.
iChat recognized it immediately.
Of course, putting my one computer outside the firewall is not an
ideal solution. On the one hand it opens the computer up to attacks. On
the other hand, it prevents other Macs on the network from using the
audio and/or video portions of iChat AV.
Fortunately Ryan Coleman of Coleman Web/Internet Services is one
of the people on my buddy list. As I tried to connect to him for a
voice chat, he monitored which port was being used. He later did the
same thing with video.
We discovered that for voice chat to work, UDP port 188 must be
open, and for video, you also need UDP port 332 open. Once I set those
two ports as open in my router, I could take my computer out of the DMZ
- and any Mac on our network with Jaguar and iChat AV could use voice
or video chat.
Thank goodness for Ryan, because I couldn't find anything in the
iChat AV documentation, help system, or Apple Knowledge Base that gave
me any idea what ports to enable to bet past the firewall.
And now you know. If you've been having problems using the AV
functions, this may be the last piece of information you need to get
things working.
Other iChat AV Issue
We discovered a few issues in the process. For one, both Ryan and I
are using titanium PowerBook G4s, and the internal microphone is
centered below the screen - less than a half-inch from the fan. As it
was a hot day, Ryan's fan was running hard, making it impossible to
hear him talk over the racket. His temporary solution was to remove the
keyboard and disconnect the cooling fan, not something you should have
to do. Poor microphone placement, Apple.
The next problem was related to video chat. We played a bit with
different settings, and I found setting the bandwidth higher than 500
kbps made no difference, but setting it to 200 kbps was not pretty. The
Connection Doctor told me that both of our systems were doing about 15
frames per second and moving about 150 kbps worth of data.
The downside is that my 400 MHz TiBook
was simply overwhelmed by the demands of the video stream. It took
several seconds to switch applications, and even quitting all inactive
programs didn't help. On slower Macs, video is a real resource hog, so
don't plan on doing much else while using video chat.
The video quality is decent, and that's probably due as much to the
pedestrian quality of most webcams as anything else. You can resize the
window, even going as large as full screen. You can do a one-way chat
if only one party has a camera attached.
In a two-way chat, you see both the person you're chatting with and
a small picture-within-a-picture view from you webcam. The smaller
image can be placed in any corner, but I didn't see a way to turn it
off. I found it distracting, even after I resized it as much as
possible. While it's nice to see what the other person is seeing, I
wonder if it might make more sense to have a separate window showing
the local image.
The only other drawback is that iChat AV only works with AOL and
.mac accounts. No chatting with friends who have
Yahoo or MSN Messenger accounts, something Apple should consider adding
in the future.
It would also be nice if iChat AV allowed you to voice chat and
video chat with people who aren't using iChat AV. Maybe Apple will add
that in the release version.
Bringing the Fun Back
Playing with iChat AV for a few hours brought some of the fun back
to computing. It's easy to change your icon (I never figured out how to
do it with iChat 1.0). And once you get past the firewall issues, voice
and video chat work quite nicely.
If you have Jaguar 10.2.5 or higher, give it a try.
