Apple iChat AV/iSight Issues

March 10, 2006

You might recall that I recently purchased an Apple iSight camera -- that nifty tube-looking gadget that connects with Apple computers running on Mac OS X 10.3 or later -- to use with iChat AV. The plug-and-play contraption has worked pretty seamlessly up until this week when, in an effort to connect with my brother out in Los Angeles (also running on iChat AV with the Apple iSight), I came across some issues.

I was a bit surprised, as I had successfully implemented a Web chat with a friend in MA (which, by the way, is very cool -- I hadn't seen this friend in a long time and it was nice to see his smiling face on my new PowerBook G4). When trying to initiate a Web chat with my brother, neither of us could accept nor start a conference. He received an error that said I wasn't available or hadn't responded. I received a message that said� "Michelle Pasquerello hasn't responded" which, what? I AM Michelle Pasquerello! Why are you telling me I'm not responding if I hit accept?! Isn't that a response?!

What gives? This worked fine the other day!

Before I decided to give up, I searched the exact words of the error messages we were both receiving. I found out that this is a common issue with iSight/iChat AV.

Apparently, the issue had to do with NAT/Firewalls (which, again, if it worked fine before, I'm not sure why I was receiving an error message). I assume the problem was on my brother's end. Hopefully he'll get to reading this tutorial and we can initiate a successful Web chat sometime soon:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=93208

Related Tags: apple, iSight, isight, Apple, ichat, iChat