Me and Peter Krantz just tried to get an iChat video chat going, just to test it out. We never got it going.
We forwarded a gazillion ports on our routers, turned off the firewalls on our laptops but to no avail.
The thing is, had we managed to get it working it would still have been way too hard to set up for any sort of reqular use. And how often do you have access to the router anyway?
This tells me that iChat is primarily made for internal, LAN based use. Am I wrong? Too bad if I am not.
“Works for me” (Caveat: sometimes on only with certain people). i.e. I have managed to succesfully video ichat with my work partner within the same city but not with my sister abroad. In the former case, neither of us touched our routers or firewalls and it just worked. In the latter, I opened up everything on both sides of the call but to no avail.
Saimon, thanks for your input.
It seems to me that iChat is not a feasible alternative for video conferencing - it is too uncertain that it will work at any given situation.