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"RTSP traffic is blocked by many firewalls, making it difficult to deliver streams reliably. The audio and video conferencing used by iChat also relies on RTSP, causing some users frustrating problems for the same reason (...)"

I thought the Mac firewall was "disabled" by default. There must be other reasons iChat video is so crappy.

Jul 09, 09 - 09:17 am Comment from: Predrag

..."I thought the Mac firewall was "disabled" by default."

It is ENABLED by default, but if you use iChat, it will automatically open the necessary ports for it. As for crappy video, it is still much better and more robust than any other a/v chat out there (better than Skype and MSN, for sure). It can sustain uninterrupted audio and useable video even as low as 50kbps (dial-up modem speeds!), which no other can.

It would be nice, though, if the http streaming made its way into iChat as well, if possible. Too many firewalls don't let it go through, and it is practically impossible to get the firewall admins open up all those ports, just so that we could pile on another bandwidth hog onto their network. Skype works practically everywhere because it CAN wrap its traffic in HTTP (with noticeable hit on performance, obviously). We could make iChat much more popular if HTTP streaming was part of it.

@Gilles

Any hardware router is, by nature, a firewall. Traffic comes in and then needs to be routed from the outside (Wide Area Network) to the inside (Local Area Network). This can be done on a per-port basis, and only certain ports are "open" by default. Other ports need to be manually "forwarded" in the router itself. Apple's routers have smart routing that make this automatic, but many 3rd-party or older routers do not, and users would need to open this port themselves.

@ Predrag

Thanks for the information. I never look under the Finder and I know nothing about Mac OS X's innards... Maybe it depends on our ISPs but my friend and I have much better video with Skype than with iChat but the sound is better in iChat.


@ Coolfactor

I use a Speedstream router because my ISP (Bell Canada) doesn't support any other modem and I can't open or close ports because the modem software is Windows only. In fact, Bell doesn't "like" Macs at all... Thanks anyway.

Jul 09, 09 - 10:36 am Comment from: MrScrith

Article is a fascinating read, up until the very last statement which is only superficially related to the rest of the article.

My buddy's brother works for Yahoo and they just set up an iPhone thing for NASA.

iphone.akamai.com/

Jul 09, 09 - 12:30 pm Comment from: Cubert

Once again Apple goes with open standards and Mafia$oft goes with proprietary "lock you in and everyone else out" technology. Meanwhile, the rest of the public continues to believe the Mac-haters who spew their early 1990's vitriole about the lack of interoperability between Macs and PC's.