From the release notes:
iChat:
Addresses potential causes of “insufficient bandwidth” alerts in iChat.
If a conference doesn’t start as expected, iChat will now offer to send a report to Apple for investigation.
Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease…
(video chat is one of those things that’s surprisingly useful, and surprisingly irritating. The combinations of clients and routers that actually work together in practice appears to be almost vanishingly small, and every time I’ve tried to do it, it’s driven me up the wall. The common failure in iChat AV is ‘insufficient bandwidth’ – which usually means something else entirely – though it’s also rather fond of ‘…did not respond.’)
Just FYI, the 10.4.7 broke my iCal (intelMac). Deleting ~/Library/Application Support/iCal fixed it. Hmm. I didn’t need to publish my calendar anyway. . .
Oh, and the update also didn’t break Mail (the last security update broke *that*, so I rolled back) and fixed ssh protocol 2, which was knackered randomly a couple of weeks ago.
Mail just unexpectedly quit for the first time ever, so I’ll keep an eye on it, but otherwise all seems fiNO CARRIER
Is i-chat the same as what normal people call things like Yahoo! Messenger? I use the latter all the time and never have any bandwidth issues. It works all over the world (the video refresh rate aways seems to be roughly the same, about 5fps at a guess); the resolution is fine (in a small picture – it looks a bit blocky if you have it full screen); and the voice is as good as phone.
I’m working in Bristol at the moment and I have it on all day, through the office server, chatting to and seeing the family back in Leeds.
Or is i-chat something different, in which case sorry to be a dingbat…?
iChat is Apple’s equivalent – it’s technically compatible with AOL IM, but that package has its own problems. Yahoo’s is, I think, reputed to be one of the more reliable of such things, but I still think you’ve been lucky if you’ve not had problems. Lots of routers just don’t seem to work with this stuff, though there are sometimes work-arounds.
Interesting to know, though. It could be that I’ve just been unusually unlucky… or that places I work (and, indeed, me) tend to be so paranoid about locking down ports in firewalls that we inadvertently block the software we’re trying to use too.
I first started using it at the beginning of last year when I was condemned to work in Toronto for 10 weeks. I tested it at Screenhouse in Leeds before I went – it worked fine (and I didn’t do any tinkering with either their server or my laptop – I wouldn’t know how).
It worked fine via my laptop in my Toronto apartment (which had a cabled broadband connection); and it worked fine in the editing suite (again a cabled broadband conection).
And it’s working fine now from RDF’s PC in Bristol – I just downloaded the software from Yahoo!, logged in and hey presto – there was my living room!
It’s a little odd when the family’s out – I keep thinking one day I’ll see a shadowy figure passing in front of the camera carrying my flat screen telly…
FWIW iChat is hunky dory here, even on this aging G3.
So… what we’re saying is that pretty much nobody has trouble with this stuff. Except me. At Christmas. At 2am. In the Royal Institution. With a crashing router that’s half a building away, behind a locked door, and under a pile of network cable. With a live TV broadcast relying on the blasted thing working, the following day. Hmm?
Ruddy typical.