how to videochat with ichat when i doesn’t actually work
June 26th, 2006disclaimer: this is getting pretty complicated in the end, you should know how to use a shell (err, Terminal.app) and what ip addresse and ports are.
now that every macbook (pro) user owns the means to make video conferences, it was time for me to give it a try, too. with its h.264 video codec, ichat offers damn good video quality and i haven’t seen anything else that can compete (anything else that’s free, free for mac users at least).
(you can skip the blahblah if you want to)
following the habits of a happy mac user, i fired up ichat, added a (macbook pro) friend to the buddy list and clicked on the video chat button, expecting everything to work just fine - as usual - but it didn’t. it didn’t work. hey, it’s an apple, it’s supposed to work out of the box. well, i soon discovered that my dsl router is in fact not from apple, and my friend’s neither - gotcha. a bit of googling revealed that we were not the only ones on the world having this problem. apparently, some people managed to get video chat running by forwarding some ports through their nat routers and breaking holes into their firewalls. didn’t work for us.
Tags:apple debian howto ichat jabber linux mac mac os nat openvpn osx router video video conference videochat virtual private network vpn