Apple has a little product called iChat AV which is only available on Mac OS X systems. I remember watching the keynote when Steve Jobs first announced the video conferencing solution and I was blown away. h.264 as the primary CODEC, great quality, multi-party chats! It's got some amazingly cool features that many other solutions don't have. There's only one problem: it doesn't work.
At this point some readers will be up in arms telling me how they were able to connect to their cousin in Utah just fine, or did a test from 2 computers in their home just fine. "IT WORKS" you'll say. In home to home situations iChat seems to work 75% of the time. The problem I'm encountering is a bit larger. We use video conferencing software (VVoIP or Video/Voice over IP) to do our video interviews from anywhere in the world. I need the highest quality solution I can find with the least amount of technical jargon to throw at the interviewee. iChat has great quality, but it has a horrible time break through firewalls and NATs. No ability to route through a NAT means no ability to actually work. Most companies have their employees on an enterprise grade NAT so when we want to interview the CEO of a company, well, with iChat we can't.
VVoIP programs such as Skype and SightSpeed are able to work on just about any network we try. Here at the Technology Evangelist office we have a Cisco NAT and iChat won't even begin to try and crawl through that. It's not a fault of our NAT as both Skype and SightSpeed work fine here. On home routers UPnP needs to be enabled and even then maybe it will connect if the firewall settings are correct. Of four different business networks I tried it on, not one worked with iChat. I thought that maybe it was just the company blocking VVoIP traffic. Nope, both SightSpeed and Skype work great on all four networks. The only app that won't work is iChat.
I brought my MacBook Pro home and tried iChat on my home network with a test Apple account. IT WORKED! Oh, and it was beautiful too. By far the best quality VVoIP I have ever seen, it's up there with pro grade video conferencing units. I was ecstatic! I then tried it again to show off iChat and... it failed with an error -8. I was able to get iChat to work on one computer, not a second computer at all and on the computer it did work on it would only work 2 out of 3 times. At this point I was pulling out my hair.
For us this is a huge bummer. Apple is introducing some amazingly cool features into the next version of iChat that include desktop sharing and automatic keying. I really hope that Apple focuses on networking first and foremost. A quick glance at the support forums will show that I am by far not the only person with this issue. For a company that makes computers and products for mere mortals, iChat AV seems to be set up for only the elite few who can get a public IP address with no firewall on both computers they want to connect to.
If you are disappointed in iChat's NAT/Firewall performance or network performance in general I would suggest sending Apple as much data as you can about the errors you are getting in iChat. When a conference fails you get a 'Communications Error' dialog. Make sure to send the details of that to Apple every single time by hitting 'Send to Apple' when this pops up. Hopefully with enough error reports pointing to bad NAT transversal, they will be able to fix it in the next version. If you simply don't use iChat anymore then sending Apple some feedback on their product may be a good idea. Let them know exactly where the issues are. I'm still an idealist so I hope and believe that Apple cares and with enough people sending constructive feedback, they will make a change for the better.
At this point some readers will be up in arms telling me how they were able to connect to their cousin in Utah just fine, or did a test from 2 computers in their home just fine. "IT WORKS" you'll say. In home to home situations iChat seems to work 75% of the time. The problem I'm encountering is a bit larger. We use video conferencing software (VVoIP or Video/Voice over IP) to do our video interviews from anywhere in the world. I need the highest quality solution I can find with the least amount of technical jargon to throw at the interviewee. iChat has great quality, but it has a horrible time break through firewalls and NATs. No ability to route through a NAT means no ability to actually work. Most companies have their employees on an enterprise grade NAT so when we want to interview the CEO of a company, well, with iChat we can't.
VVoIP programs such as Skype and SightSpeed are able to work on just about any network we try. Here at the Technology Evangelist office we have a Cisco NAT and iChat won't even begin to try and crawl through that. It's not a fault of our NAT as both Skype and SightSpeed work fine here. On home routers UPnP needs to be enabled and even then maybe it will connect if the firewall settings are correct. Of four different business networks I tried it on, not one worked with iChat. I thought that maybe it was just the company blocking VVoIP traffic. Nope, both SightSpeed and Skype work great on all four networks. The only app that won't work is iChat.
I brought my MacBook Pro home and tried iChat on my home network with a test Apple account. IT WORKED! Oh, and it was beautiful too. By far the best quality VVoIP I have ever seen, it's up there with pro grade video conferencing units. I was ecstatic! I then tried it again to show off iChat and... it failed with an error -8. I was able to get iChat to work on one computer, not a second computer at all and on the computer it did work on it would only work 2 out of 3 times. At this point I was pulling out my hair.
For us this is a huge bummer. Apple is introducing some amazingly cool features into the next version of iChat that include desktop sharing and automatic keying. I really hope that Apple focuses on networking first and foremost. A quick glance at the support forums will show that I am by far not the only person with this issue. For a company that makes computers and products for mere mortals, iChat AV seems to be set up for only the elite few who can get a public IP address with no firewall on both computers they want to connect to.
If you are disappointed in iChat's NAT/Firewall performance or network performance in general I would suggest sending Apple as much data as you can about the errors you are getting in iChat. When a conference fails you get a 'Communications Error' dialog. Make sure to send the details of that to Apple every single time by hitting 'Send to Apple' when this pops up. Hopefully with enough error reports pointing to bad NAT transversal, they will be able to fix it in the next version. If you simply don't use iChat anymore then sending Apple some feedback on their product may be a good idea. Let them know exactly where the issues are. I'm still an idealist so I hope and believe that Apple cares and with enough people sending constructive feedback, they will make a change for the better.
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