[Parky]

I have an external Firewire Drive and iSight.

When I have the iSight camera connected, and turned on or off, I have problems using the external drive.

If I try to copy files from the drive with the camera connected, the drive dismounts and the copy fails.

If I disconnect the iSight, the copy works fine.

I have the camera in one Firewire port and the hard drive in the other port on my FP iMac.

The hard drive will also disappear while I am playing music in iTunes if the camera is connected (on or off), but plays OK with the camera removed.

Does anyone have any ideas, it's as though the firewire can't copy with the transfers.

I have reinstalled iChatAV, no difference.

Help please

[Grrr]

I dont know what causes it exactly, but it is definitely a known issue. And I highly recomend you stop plugging your iSight cam into the HD's spare port. Many users have lost data because of this very issue.
Have a read of this..
http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...It.4@.59976d10

[Parky]

Thanks for the heads up.

I'm pretty angry now that this looks like a Apple problem yet again.

Was this tested? Seems not, as there are quite a few people with the same problem.

Moral of story, don't buy an iSight camera if you have an external fiewire drive and expect to use it.

[MisterRogers]

I understand your frustation; but remember, this is beta software, and advertised as such. You could make the case that the drivers for iSight are shipping, and thus not beta, but since iSight and iChatAV are intended to work together...

Be patient just a little longer. They'll have it stable soon. I'm already seeing more stability with iSight/iChatAV in the latest build.

[Link]

M-R... I have no trust in apple at all anymore when it comes to the "they'll fix it up eventually" thing as I still have ichat 1 and OS X jaguar.. ichat 1 apparently won't be updated and still has lots of funky quirks and jaguar STILL doesn't do ftp right..

Who's to say that apple won't come up with some fancy new ichat 3 and then charge for that?

[Parky]

As a buyer of iSight I am not entitled to the full release of iChat, therefore how are these two Apple products 'made for each other'.

iSight is a fully released product, it is not iChatAv that is causing the drive problems it is the iSight hardware.

Will Apple be releasing updated drivers for iSight, or will we need to buy iChatAV when it is released?

If they are such closely linked products all iSight buyers should be given the full release of iChatAV when it comes out. But we know that won't happen. Apple will expect us to buy either iChatAV or Panther.

Apple's own website states - "Requires iChat AV Software (not included), Mac OS X v.10.2.5 or later, 600MHz G3 processor or higher, Broadband Internet connection."

I wonder if future iSight users will get the full release of iChatAV if they buy their camera after the software is finally released.

Or does it mean that to use iSight for iChatAV you will have to spend $149 on the camera plus £29 on iChatAV or $149 on Panther.

What use is iSight with out software? This is a joke!

It's like selling iPods and making iTunes and extra, maybe that will be next.

Apple need to say something about the hardware issues with iSight.

Clearly on my iMac with 2 firewire ports (both on the same internal bus), there is a problem that iSight takes too much power from the bus. Does this means that iSight was not designed for these machines? Did they not consider the fact that users may have other Firewire devices in the firewire ports.

As a software and hardware company who prides itself on doing things 'properly', same on you Apple for failing yet again. Steve can do a great selling job, pity the goods don't live up to his promises.

Ian

[MisterRogers]

I really do understand where you're coming from Parky. Though I've been able to stay hopeful and enjoy the good in OS X/Apple products. I develop Mac and Windows retail software for a living, and really I've always been impressed with how good Apple's software is considering how aggressive they are to develop/evolve/add new features. Writing the easiest to use software take the most effort, and in my experience, Apple does a pretty good job of putting out reasonable stable Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Release software.

I like change, so Apple's agressiveness, and the price we pay (bugs, aggressive changes) is worth it to me. I understand that it isn't worth it to others. The reality is though, for the amount of development work Apple does, they really do well bug/stability wise. We could have greater stability/fewer bugs, but it would mean Apple being less agressive with pushing the envelope - which is Apple's strong suit.

I can hear the comments already: Apple lead the way with innovation and put out stable software that does everything we want it to. Well, somethings gotta give. We like yearly OS/6 month major product upgrade cycles, lots of new stuff, plus the sort of stability you get with a code base that has been carefully coded, fully debugged, and not released until it is. Something's gotta give.

This isn't targeted to anyone in particular, I just think we tend to want to have our cake, and eat it too.

MisterRogers

[israces]

[/END frustrated ranting]

Now back to topic, is the exact cause of this known? From my experiences (similar to those mentioned) it appears to be a iSight, external FW drive issue with a dash of iTunes thrown in (I used to think it was cool when an incoming video chat would mute your iTunes, now I think this might be involved in the problems).

I'm having problems while iSight is plugged into a Belkin 4 port FW hub (externally powered) along with a WD HDD in a Pyro1394 case and my iPod. The hub is plugged into my PB Ti400. iTunes library is on the FW drive.

When doing imports, I consistently get Finder crashes that do not recover and iTunes crashes. Force Quit does nothing and I have to do a hard reset. When I do the hard reset, for some reason, my system comes back and the screen brightness is dimmed. I've heard that iSight can "hijack" preferences, so I wonder if that has anything to do with anything.

MOTHERFU ER just crashed again!!!!
Any ideas, help?

[israces]

*BUMP*

Anyone heard anything new about this issue?

[dcsmrgun]

I don't think this is Apple specific, rather a firewire issue in general. I got the same symptoms on several other machines, mostly Windows, when I plugged in a DV converter to try to convert some old camcorder tapes to DV. Windows complains that a delayed write failed and data may have been lost, after which the drive refuses to work properly. OSX shows the same symptoms you described.

My best guess is that the AV devices in question hog the FW controller's bandwidth, possibly causing collisions between data packets, to borrow some network terms.

This is described similarly by at least one fellow on the apple discussions group linked above.

[voyageur]

Add me to the list of folks who have had FireWire disks unmount and become unreadable if an iSight is connected at the same time.

I thought updating to OS 10.2.8 had fixed it at first, but no dice.

[badtz]

This really bites! As I only have one firewire port [and I definitely can't risk losing data on the FW drive]


Is this a iSight hardware problem that's un-fixable via a software/firmware update?

:X

[ranga]

I have a similar problem with my external FW CD-R/RW an the iSight.

If I connect the iSight to FW port 1 of my QuickSilver and the CD-R/RW to FW port 2 of my QuickSilver, I can't burn any cds. I keep getting buffer underruns and other errors. At first I though that it was because I had a bad drive or maybe a bad case but when I unplugged the iSight the problems went away.

If I put a PCI FW card in my QuickSilver and connect the iSight to that I don't have any problems with the CD-R/RW. I've also found that if I daisy chain the iSight and the CD-R/RW, the problems go away.

I would prefer to use a PCI FW card, but unfortunately I haven't been able to find one that supports deep sleep, so for now I'm stuck daisy-chaining the CD-R/RW and the iSight.

--ranga