Why would my video chat invitation be instantly declined by the invitee when he didn't do it? And I mean the invitation is declined instantly.

Question

When I invite my father-in-law to a video iChat, my iChat window launches and instantly says "David declined the invitation". Instantly! and then my window video freezes. I absolutely know that he isn't declining. And anyway, no one could decline as instantly as it happens. What's going on?

Answer 1

Hi,
Since Snow Leopard (iChat 5)  iChat has used or accessed as much of the Internet speed it can see.
Before that it was limited by the speed set in the System Preferences > Quicktime > Streaming tab at about 1.5Mbps no matter what Internet speed you had.
In iChat 5 and 6  iChat tends to try and use as much of the internet speed as possible.
This mean if you have a 2Mbps upload services it will try to send things that fast to your Buddy.
In some cases it does appear that the other end cannot always supply feedback as to a much more useful speed (it is supposed to be "negotiated" between the two ends).
iChat also stores or writes the speed it can see when it Starts up to it's .plist
This can be distorted if your iChat is starting up when the computer does.
It would seem that you have healthy enough internet speeds but this is not what iChat thinks it has as it is giving your the red crosses.
In Lion go to the Finder and the Finder's Go Menu.
Hold the ALT key and then select the Library that appears.
Then go to the Preferences and find com.apple.ichat.plist and the .lockfile of the same name.
Drag these to the Trash and Restart iChat.
I would hold off on Setting 200kbps for now.
What it does is lower the Internet Speed you use.
200kbps is good enough for 1-1 video chats.
In effect what is does is drop your speed below any variance level that might be effecting things form the ISP Service.
It tends to also stop one end over-running the other with a faster data stream (Particularly at 500kbps)
10:04 PM      Monday; November 21, 2011
Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"
  iMac 2.5Ghz 5i 2011 (Lion 10.7.2)
 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb (Snow Leopard 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously