Ichat slowly crashes after two minutes or so with one user only

Question

I've been using ichat for years with my parents and brother, My brother has an older imac and we can chat just fine. Recently ichat has not been working with my parents mini mac, although it used to quite well. Chat starts off fine and slowly deteriorates, after two minutes or so the video and audio become so bad it's not worth continuing. We both have the same versions of OS 10 and ichat and I am at a loss to explain the trouble. If we watch the connection doctor as we chat, my signal slowly drops till it can't carry the load. When I call my brother, no loss of signal. I am using airport but when I connect the cable directly there is no change, signal strength still falls off. As far as we know, no hardware or software changes have been made to either system. I recently upgraded my internet connection speed to try and beat the problem but it didn't resolve the issue. We did learn that if we both make our video windows as small as possible, we can talk on the deteriorated signal. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Hi
First have you and your parents set the Quicktime streaming setting, goto sys prefs/quicktime/streaming/streaming speed, set to 1.5mbps
In ichats prefs click on video and change bandwidth limit to 500
Restart iChat.
Tony