Poor one-sided ichat video quality

The video picture that I see when ichatting with my mom is awful (around 50%). It only happens when I ichat with her, and she sees me fine. Our audio is also fine. My connection doctor indicated that: her video quality was 50%,her bitrate was 300 & mine was 600. Her connection doctor indicated that her bitrate was 700 & mine was 600. (I think both frame rates in both of our panels ranged between 11-17.) We both have MacBook Airs. Any thoughts as to what's happening and how to remedy it would be greatly appreciated. She bought the MacBook Air just so that we could ichat.
Thanks.

Hi
On your mum's mac go to ichats prefs click on video and change bandwidth limit to 500, if still happens try 200.
Restart iChat.
Tony

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IChat Video Quality Low - Stumped

Hi all,
The basics of my problem is my Ichat video quality is very low.
I have a 10mb connection and im in Tennessee, USA, the person im trying to reach has a 8mb connection and is in California, USA.
When I chat with this person my connection doctor always says im getting a 150 to 300 bit rate. The video quality seems very low to me. Which I would think is super low for such a fast connection between our computers. It never goes above 300.
I've read over many posts here on the forum and we have done the Set Quicktime to 1.5mb & Set my Ichat Video Prefs Limit to "None" and restarted, on both ends. Still limits at 300.
I've also checked the connection speeds on both ends, via pings to various places around the net & across the country and hold down a decent to good 3.5 to 8.5mbs connection.
A little system info:
My Side:
- G5 Dual 2.5GHZ
- Isight (external Camera via Firewire port)
- Airport Wireless Card
- Airport Extreme (with DHCP on to route my multi machines wirelessly on the network)
- Cable Modem - Plugs into Airport - up to 10mbs connection
- iChat 3
- OS X 10.4.8
Other side:
- Intel Imac (brand new)
- Isight (built in)
- Cable Modem direct - up to 8mbs connection
- iChat 3
- OS X 10.4.8
It seems like there is something im overlooking.
Please help as im a bit stumped on this one! :P
- Guru Kismet

I have 3 machines on the Airport network (though none of the others where being used during the testing).
I connected my Cable modem directly to my G5 via Ethernet my speeds jumped! Then I discovered it was being caused by my Airport Extreme. Which loves to knock me off the network from time to time.
In my Airport Extreme "wireless options" I changed the Multicast Rate and then clicked on "Enable interference robustness" my chat speeds jumped from 200k to 800k+. The quality of my video improved dramatically.
After further testing with just one machine and then later restoring all machines back on the Airport Network, I found that there was some sort of interference from other wireless devices around the house, even the ones downstairs.
I would suggest this for anyone having trouble with your Airport Extreme knocking you off the internet or network from time to time or if your Ichat speeds & quality are really low.
Problem solved!
Best wishes to all,
Guru Kismet

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Hi,
I am using iChat with 2 other person (so a total of 3 people in the video conferencing). What we noticed is that the audio quality remains great. But as soon as the third person joins the video chat, the video quality decrease dramatically.
Any one experience this problem?
Thanks.

Thanks for the reply.
Have you set the Quicktime setting, goto sys
prefs/quicktime/streaming/streaming speed set what
you get from your ISP go no higher then 1.5mbps(dont
use automatic)
I didn't know that Quicktime has anything to do with iChat. I will check that tonight.
In ichats prefs click on video and change bandwidth
limit to NONE.
Alread set to NONE so this shouldn't be a problem.
Also all of you do a speed test
http://www.speedtest.net/ and tell us the up and
download speeds are.
I have done many similar tests and it is consistently rated as "excellent". I will need to do the test to find out the exact rate tonight when I am home.
So, out of the 3 things, sound like the Quicktime setting is the only one that I have not done.
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The Screen names make no difference.
It is about a combination of Proccessor, Video card in iChat 4, internet Connection and settings and the amount of Bandwidth you get out of that connection.
As Defcom (UK) has said start with those basic Settings.
In iChat 3 and 2 the Quicktime setting when on Automatic is read as a 0 (zero) and this effectively Caps iChat.
In iChat 4 the Automatic setting is seen as 384k which is the MINIMUM for a 4 way chat.
As far as an Internet Connection goes this should be at Least 100k in both Up and Downloads.
Due to some data stream management to cut down on Peer-to-Peer file Sharing it pays to limit iChat in the Video Section Bandwidth Limit section to slip under the Radar as it were. There are two main ISP doing this Comcast and Road Runner in the States.
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IChat Video Quality vs. Bandwidth FAQ?

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Thanks, I did both tweaks and the really improved the 3 way conference.
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[IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/145047165.png[/IMG]
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Hi
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I am just guessing. Is this true? Or just in our case? Our being myself and my girlfriend, who is the one with a cam. I am new to iChat but I am not receiving that 'full screen, perfect quality' image that I thought iChat was supposed to have. You see, my girlfriend has a Macbook with its own built-in camera, so I am sure that camera is up to iChat specifications. But, her internet connection is through Sprint's EVDO USB modem. For the techs here, she is using the pretty new Sierra 595U, and she gets EVDO speed where she is.
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IChat video quality problem

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

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
Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

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I currently have a iMac G5 w/isight connected to a airport express wich in turn is connected directly to a ethernet port of my isp (apartment complex)
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Hi,
I have been using iChat and Skype for the last 2 years. My Girlfriend lives in the states and we both have macs so life has been made much, much easier.
To be honest, I have tended to favour Skype much more than iChat fo rthe simple reason that the sound quality has so so much better. iChat was ...ok. But Skype made you feel like you were in the same room. I assume that it is the same for everyone and not just us, so why has mac not been able (or willing) to have something of the same quality?
Towards the end of last year we both aquired iSights. We couldn't always get them to work on Skype so we started using them with ichat with the audio muted and talking via skype.
Both of us travel a lot due to work so a lot of the time we are in hotels and I know the internet connection can be a bit crappy, but even at home I have to say that I have always been a little bit dissapointed at the iChat video quality, but only because when I first saw it advertised the picture/video looked amazing. And I have never seen it come close. On the up side, I certainly am not complaing. Both services have kept us in touch like we never could have 5 years ago. And for free, too!
On the subject of Skype, the quality over the 2 years I have been using it has deteriorated to an almost un-usable standard. The amount of users has more than doubled in that time and I also read that ISP's are now managing the flow of peer to peer users, slowing it down when they want to.
Unfortunately I am not that knowledgable about these kind of things and so really don't know how it all works.
Am I wrong to wish that apple could make a better way to comunicate?

Wow, that was pretty cool. I had tried looking for something like that this afternoon but didn't have much luck.
[IMG]http://www.speedtest.net/result/95579018.png[/IMG]
I'll have to do some research in order to learn what relevance my score has, but if you haven't clicked on the link, it was;
Download - 949 kb/s
Upload - 239 kb/s
Latency: 103 ms
Server: Dublin (to Manchester)
Distance: 150 miles
I'd already read some of the posts you guys have commented on this matter and I took the advice of setting streaming speeds and bandwidths. But it didn't have any effect.
I apologise for keep mentioning (skype), but when it was good it certainly was good. Audio wise at least. I'm still curious as to why Mac haven't had anything that good yet. If however iChat and Skype are two completely different things then you'll have to excuse me for my ignorance.

Poor one-sided ichat video quality

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