hey guys

when i fire up aMSN to my girlfriend she can see me no worries when i start the webcam request.. but when she sends one to me.. it says

[18:26:17] You just received a video conversation (bidirectional audio and video) request. This feature is not yet supported by aMSN and has been canceled. However, you can still use the standard webcam conversation.
Click Here to ask for your contact's webcam, or Click Here to ask for sending your own webcam

[18:26:21] Sent request to receive webcam

then I click on "ask for your contacts webcam" and it doesn't work...

any ideas why? anyone else have this working?

thanks

jimmy

I recommend Skype for Mac>PC video chats

The OS X client is great.

the only MSN client I know of that has webcam support on OS X is Mercury.

Seconded.

Does anyone have anything good/bad to say about Mercury? I downloaded version 1.8 and couldn't make up my mind about it. On my MacBook Mercury needs to log on twice (always fails the first time for some reason) but that's not an issue; perhaps I'm just not used to the Java interface? I've tried Skype but I only have one contact with Skype on their system.

As I understand it, aMSN will not do audio. You might try individually sending your webcams, ie. in Windows, not "Start a Video Conversation", but "Send my Webcam", and then you can "Send Webcam"

Mercury may do audio and video depending on the version of Messenger the other party is using.
My experiences with Mercury Video have been very slow, on a 1.5GHz Powerbook G4

In my experience the best bet for Mac -> Windows, audio and video, is Skype.

Well I found it 'alright'. It wasn't very nicely designed and was well ugly. Give me adium any day but I did try it for a video conference and the video is tiny and the quality was very average. To make sure it wasn't the person I was looking at's webcam, I switched to a Win XP MSN Messenger and it was much much better. I think Skype would be a better option, am going to try it myself tonight.

Thanks for the tip (and the laugh) Wheels.

I don't get why everyone's not using Skype! It kills MSN for Mac support and works well in Windows.

Stupid PC people, grandparents, clueless people and (often) the fact that MSN messenger is "built in" are the main reasons why. Also many people are on MSN already - it's easy to convince 1 person to change, but when you want 10 other people to switch, those ten other people have other contacts that only have MSN - hence alot of hesitancy to change. So very difficult unless you only want to talk to one or two people or your friends are tech-savvy.

I guess the best choice would be to use a system like adium or Fire etc which allow multiple IM login - it's just a shame that none of them have webcam support.


A frustrating issue that has bothered me for years - but look s like having no solution until people wise up and switch out of Microsoft crap.