[THE MAC GOD]

For Christmas, I bought myself and my girlfriend an iSight camera.
She's using it at her University and me at home. Whenever we send chat requests, it says setting up, then it says insufficient bandwidth. Now, it's not me... I have a 9mbps/1mpbs and vid chat with my other friends.
Her connection is testing at always above 1024.6kbps through the cnet test which is definitely fine and her iBook is the currently shipping 12".

Why would that pop up? If the university is blocking ports, then we wouldn't even be able to send the invite... and if the bandwidth was controlled, she wouldn't be testing at that speed consistently. Why isn't it working? Any ideas?

[Uriel]

could it be that they are blocking the video port but not the other ports? I had this problem and it turned out that it was a port being blocked.

[Cadaver]

Originally Posted by THE MAC GOD

Why would that pop up? If the university is blocking ports, then we wouldn't even be able to send the invite...

Not really true.
The school's firewalls or proxy servers can do strange things with iChat. What happens if you initiate from the other machine? Same result? Can do you voice chat without issues? Double check your girlfriend's iBook's firewall settings, too.

[tooki]

I've seen the same thing. iChat's error messages seem to all be bogus. I don't think the "insufficient bandwidth" error ever appears when there actually isn't enough bandwidth. (When I've encountered actual bandwidth problems, iChat has simply beachballed.)

tooki

[THE MAC GOD]

Ok... new twist...

She came back today, so I tried videoing with my bud from my house with her iBook.... Gave me an error. I did it with my machine fine. So, for grins, I swapped the cameras around to make sure that that wasn't the problem.
Then, we tried using both wireless and a lan connection and they worked fine from my G4, but not the iBook. Kept getting "Did not repsond"...
So, it's her machine... but why? It makes no sense... I tried even putting a new user on the iBook and doing it that way, but no luck.
So, her iBook is for some reason blocking everything... or something... the firewall hasn't been on and isn't on... So, the ibook is definitely the problem. And, the firewire port IS good...I can watch myself all day long through ichat.

ARRGGHH... $300 down the drain.

[tooki]

All you did was prove what we already knew: the camera isn't the problem. It never was. If you were able to see yourself in iSight in the preview window, you already knew the camera was working.

iChat is picky about networking, and the error messages it produces when it encounters network problems are often just plain wrong.

Chances are her university has some ports firewalled that iChat needs to function. (You can test this theory by turning on the firewall on your router and not opening any ports.) There is nothing you or she can do from the desktop to fix this. Instead, talk to the network administrators and show them Apple Support: Using iChat AV with a firewall or NAT router and ask if they can open up the necessary ports.

As for at your friend's house... hmm... perhaps she somehow activated the command-line firewall, e.g. with one of the third-party utilities that can control it. And are you sure there isn't a third-party app, like Little Snitch or any of the 'internet security' suites, on it?

tooki

[THE MAC GOD]

Ok...
Houston... we are in orbit!

The problem was Apple Remote Desktop in the Sharing CP... Turn it OFF!

Now she can video chat with the best of them... at least from my apartment.

I'll post here when she goes back to school if we have problems or not.

[tooki]

That's REALLY weird, because that should not have any effect on iChat whatsoever. Hmmm...

tooki

[THE MAC GOD]

I actually got the idea here....

[THE MAC GOD]

Sorry... double post.