IChat video quality problem

Question

hi guys. ive been using ichat recently. and its great. audio is good. No lag. video looks smooth... But that comes with a price. Whenever my friend makes a sudden movement. the video starts to distort for a few seconds. I've been reading that me and my friend should set our bandwidth at the same speed. However, this doesnt help. Im running on Leopard Aluminum Macbook 2009 model. Shes running on Snow Leopard Macbook Pro 2010 model.
anyone else experiencing this?
Message was edited by: batmandarkknight

Answer 1

Hi,
At the Leopard end have you also set System Preferences > Quicktime > Streaming to 1.5Mbps
In Leopard iChat reads the Quicktime Streaming speed and sets this as the Bandwidth.
It does not read the Automatic Setting that well and iChat 4 makes iChat see this as only 384kbps
If you have to change this restart iChat so it "Sees" the new speed.
1.5Mbps may still cap some of your Internet Speed.
However it is more than enough for iChat to Host 4 way Video chats.
This can be seen in two ways:-
1) At a basic level it gets the most out of your Connection that can be managed for iChat.
2) With modern internet speeds, it caps everyone to with a narrow band of speed.
What this then does it stops or rather smooths out variances in your connection speed which in turn helps the iChat Buffering.
In iChat you can see you variances (and that of your Buddy) in the Connection Doctor (Video menu) during a chat.
If your Upload speed is greater than 1.5Mbps then the Quicktime setting will be a limit.
However a 5% variance of your speed of a max of 1.5Mbps in iChat 4 is likely to be significantly less than someone in iChat 5 with a 20Mbps Upload and download speed. iChat's buffering seems to cope with the variances of the 1.5Mbps setting.
iChat 5 can only be capped within iChat itself, which is why I have suggested it.
(it does not have the Quicktime setting). It gives a better chance for the iChat Buffering to cope.
I mostly use use my G4 running OS 10.5.8 to do iChat.
I have one Buddy with Mac Pro (therefore OS 10.6.4) and I must admit this iChat 4 to iChat 5 connection is the most unstable of all the cross version chat I have tried.
One more thing that may help is more Light.
The less light there is the less chance the camera has of producing a stable Video Stream even on an Intel.
Window to one side or behind the person can make the face and hand difficult to pick out as the camera is trying to balance out the brightness behind the person.
Night-time with low levels of front on light can be a problem as well.
10:12 PM Wednesday; September 15, 2010
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