Any OS X IM clients supporting MSN video chat?

March 9, 2005 1:46 PM

Some friends are considering making the switch to an iBook but they use MSN video chat to keep in touch with several friends abroad and this is a must-have feature for them. I couldn't locate any OS X IM clients that support MSN video chat, although rumors indicate the next version of the official client will support it. Does anyone know if any clients exist now for OS X that would work for them?
posted by harmfulray to computers & internet (10 comments total)

The version of iChat in Tiger (10.4) does not support MSN anything as far as I know. What would work is have your friend use iChat (you can configure iChat to use AIM) and have their friends use AOL on their Windows boxes.

It should work fine.
posted by glyphlet at 1:54 PM on March 9, 2005

Have you looked at Fire?
posted by omidius at 2:12 PM on March 9, 2005

D'oh!

I should have looked at VersionTracker first. Here's a link to an app that'll let you do MSN Video chat. It's Java and it's not a 1.0 release, but it says it'll work...
posted by glyphlet at 2:13 PM on March 9, 2005

Fire doesn't support audio or video chatting. Proxies either for that matter.
posted by glyphlet at 2:17 PM on March 9, 2005

Glyphlet: thanks, I saw that one but it's receive-only ("for now"). I may end up contacting the developer to see how far off transmit functionality is but I am hoping to find something that's already been released.
posted by harmfulray at 2:51 PM on March 9, 2005

Bummer.

Video chat lags way behind on the Mac. It's very frustrating. I think the iChat/AIM option is the most workable option.
posted by glyphlet at 3:19 PM on March 9, 2005

Video chat lags way behind on the Mac.

Actually, video chat is excellent on a mac if both parties have ichat AV and iSight cameras. The problem is like MSN's stuff, it's platform dependent and proprietary all too often.
posted by mathowie at 5:14 PM on March 9, 2005

I was looking into this recently. While there doesn't seem to be a good way to do MSN video chat on the mac, you can do iChat video on the PC. From apple's iChat site:

iChat AV 2.1 supports videoconferencing with the new AOL Instant Messenger 5.5 for Windows, giving you immediate access to the millions of people in both the Mac and PC communities. iChat AV 2.1 requires Mac OS X v10.3 or later.

But I've heard that the result isn't stellar. If you can live with just audio chat, I reccomend skype which has good windows and mac clients.
posted by Popular Ethics at 7:33 PM on March 9, 2005

XP -Mac video chat results, in fact, are not stellar. But the primary issues are:

a) AOL IM XP restricts the inbound video to a native size window of 120xsomething-or-other.

b) Mac users will experience video that is notably less posished than that afforded by the Steverino-approved iChat/iSight combo.

In testing this with two partners last spring, AIM XP was also somewhat obtuse to configure. However, in these tests, our tech people were Mac-oriented and unfamilar with the organizational strategies employed by wintel apps.

Also, to respond to the original question:

As mathowie notes, Mac-to-Mac under iSight/iChat with broadband is really quite amazing: full-screen, full-motion, if interpolated and a bit jerky as latency and bandwidth choke the signal - but 85%-90% of the time, it's a fully-functioning video phone.

There is no current support for MSN in iChat. I have not heard of any plans to do so, and in fact, such plans would greatly surprise me. If Google planned to roll out a video-chat thingy, then maybe. But not til then.
posted by mwhybark at 9:30 PM on March 9, 2005

Addendum to mathowie's comment: I use iChat 2.1 with a Sony TR-120 camcorder plugged into the FireWire port. No iCam required.
posted by squirrel at 9:51 PM on March 9, 2005