Article:		Audio/Video Conferencing with iChat AV
Subject:		iChat Video Conferencing
Date:		2003-06-28 12:15:51
From:		bryrock
I got my first iChat AV call on Thursday afternoon after a friend of mine in another state blew me away by going out and buying and iSight (he always broke). I use a Sony TRV25 as my webcam. Our first video conference went flawlessly, even though both of us were using iChat AV for the first time. Since then, however, it has been very frustrating. We are nearly always able to audio conference, but most of our attempts at video conferencing result in video with no audio. We made multiple attempts on Thursday night and finally got it working (neither of us knows what if anything we did made the difference) and held on to a conference for nearly 2 hours. Friday night we tried again for hours, but could never get any audio working unless we stuck to audio conferencing only.

Showing messages 1 through 2 of 2.

• iChat Video Conferencing
  2003-06-28 13:19:50  Derrick Story | [View]
  
  
  Hi, thanks for your feedback here. I think since this is such new stuff, we're going to have to compare lots of notes with each other as we learn how to navigate these waters.
  
  A few things I'd like to know is what type of broadband service you both have, if you've experienced the same problems with others, and if you've tried other configurations, such as using the mic on your Mac, on your camcorder, griffin iMic, etc. :)
• iChat Video Conferencing
  2003-06-30 10:51:08  bryrock [View]
  
  
  First, after reading a technote at Apple (http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93218), we zeroed in our trouble-shooting to my buddy's Airport network. That appeared to be the chief source of our problems. First, he went back to an Ethernet connection and our silent video conferencing troubles were over, consistantly. Then we tried with him going back to Airport but both of us limited our bandwidth to 500 kps. Could be coincidence, but we were able to do video conf with sound.
  
  I have used both my camera mic and an external mic I still had shrink wrapped from my old 8500 (I currently use a dual 500 G4 PowerMac). When we had no audio, that never seemed to make a differnce, though, only a few times, my iChat AV would crash as I switched from one mic to another using the pulldown in the "video" portion of the prefrences.
  
  My broadband service is SpeakEasy (Covad) DSL and my buddy has Earthlink via Time-Warner cable. He's a relatively new Mac user and I had to walk him through how to effectively use the Locations in the Network prefs so he didn't have to spend so much time reconfiguring when he switched from Ethernet to Aiport. That worked well, though his cable gateway is kinda funky and seems to require a reset when he switches from wire to wireless. Also, he does not actually use the Airport base. He simply has cards in both an iMac and an iBook and does a software base. Surprisingly, that does seem to work most of the time.
  
  Summary, when my buddy uses Ethernet we have no silent video problems. If he uses Aiport and a 500kps limit, we seem to be able to both audio conf and video conf wih sound most of the time.