Ichat Connection Speeds

Question

Little Problem, ill try and make it simple. Live and play hockey in Germany, and parents wants to watch the games back in canada, but they are not available. With Ichat I tried allowing sharing my screen with them but the connections speeds are too low and read max 40-50 kbps which isnt enough to support the feed. Anyway that I can boost that up to 500-1000 so the video stream is clean? Might be a stupid question, but i've searched everything and can't figure it out. Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,
For a Video chat you need at least 100kbps for a one way chat.
That is you have to have a usable speed of 100kbps.
If you have a 128kbps Upload Speed you get about 80% of that reported in Speed test sites which comes down to 104kbps (in round numbers).
Some of other hardware you have will also play a part, such as the Processor and how busy that or the Graphics card may be.
I presume you are watching or playing back the Video of the games and then Sharing the Screen to show that.
This might be an option if the Game is a live TV feed to your computer.
(I initially thought you were doing it from the game and couldn't see why you were doing it by Screen Share)
Technically Screen Share is a picture of much less quality and does not require the same sort of Bandwidth/Internet Connection Speed.
The 10.5.x (iChat 4.x) specs are here and are essentially the same for iChat 5 (Snow Leopard 10.6.x)
If it is a recording that plays back in Quicktime Player I would think of using the iChat Theatre option.
There are drawbacks to this as the ration stays at 4:3 and your recording may well be in 16:9 and iChat will cut off the edges which may be unhelpful for a game like hockey.
The controlling factor in this is the Upload speed you have as iChat will work on this and not the Download speed if it is different (it is usually much higher).
8:27 PM Saturday; November 6, 2010
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