iChat Video

By on June 26, 2008 in Basic, iChat, Mac

For those read­ers out there who are using a Mac, I hope you are using iChat. Long ago I got tired of all the junk MSN had to offer and since I started using iChat I won’t ever go back. How­ever, I recently had been hav­ing prob­lems get­ting a video chat going on my Mac­book while I was at work on my iMac and my wife was on the Mac­book. After some search around on the inter­net I learned some very great tips.

First is how to test your video to see if the prob­lem is on your end of the con­nec­tion. You can then test your con­nec­tion with one of three little-known Apple iChat test buddies.

These are added using the + icon on iChat’s buddy list, keep­ing the Account type as AIM, and cre­at­ing 3 sep­a­rate bud­dies by enter­ing one name at a time into the Account name: field, hit­ting the Add but­ton, and repeat­ing that process until all 3 are added.

appleu3test01
appleu3test02
appleu3test03The next step is to click on the bright green cam­era icon next to one of these names, the first two of which run Apple com­mer­cials on non-stop loops (below), the third of which is sup­posed to mir­ror back your video to you. If one of the three names is grayed out, some­one else is test­ing with it now, but if it’s bright green, you can con­nect and do a test right away. If it works and runs sta­ble, your machine’s just fine and your con­nec­tion is just fine. If it con­nects but runs slug­gish, your Inter­net con­nec­tion is prob­a­bly to blame if you’re not run­ning any other pro­grams and using a recent (G5 or Intel) Mac.

What I dis­cov­ered after this process was that my inter­net con­nec­tion was fine and even my router set­tings were fine. (That’s another whole topic) Then I dis­cov­ered a sim­ple set­ting that can cause iChat video to not work. You need to make sure that under the Shar­ing Pref­er­ence Pane in Sys­tem Pref­er­ences that the Inter­net Shar­ing box is unchecked. Once I unchecked the box iChat video was up and run­ning as usual. I guess I must have turned it on for some reason.

Happy Chat­ting!
If you are on ichat.… look me up dgrunau AT mac DOT com

5 Responses to iChat Video

  1. Jared July 2, 2008 at 4:34 pm #

    What if you are not using AIM? I’m using Jab­ber through iChat. Does it still work?

  2. Greg July 2, 2008 at 4:43 pm #

    Jared, as far as I know, Jab­ber through iChat is text only.

  3. Jared July 3, 2008 at 10:07 am #

    That’s what I thought. Too bad.
    BTW, love the site! You nerds rock the free world!
    /j

  4. Greg July 4, 2008 at 12:55 am #

    Update: You can GTalk on an iPhone or iPod Touch through a web browser:

  5. Greg July 4, 2008 at 12:56 am #

    Alright, the link­age didn’t work. You’ll have to cut-and-paste:
    http://macdailynews.com/index.php/weblog/comments/17755/

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