iChat AV Communication Error

As I mentioned before my wife is on a trip until Sunday. Her schedule finally permitted her an early morning break...seven to eight AM, if that can be considered early...to try to chat and say hello to me and the kids.

We both have access to MacBooks, so naturally we'd use iChat AV to video chat. I use it quite a bit to chat with my mother when she wants to say hello to her grandson before bedtime. If she can use it to video chat with me then that should say something for how easy to use iChat is for a task like that.

But it wouldn't work.

Every freakin' time we tried, it would give some communication error.

Searching online gives a lot of entries from people stretching back YEARS saying it could be because of your router, because of firewall or quicktime settings, yadda yadda blah blah. You know the only reliable fix?

Use Skype.

I like iChat. But how, after all this time, can they not get video chat working properly?? It's one of their big features...you're supposed to be able to video conference people on a snazzy 3D-like display but apparently if you have some minor glitch in the handshaking that establishes the connection you will get a vague "error" that offers to send the information to Apple who in turn will ignore the issue.

I had this happen when chatting with my mother...it errored out, it errored out, then one day it worked. It's been working since. I didn't change my router. I didn't alter anything on her end. It just decided, "Hey, maybe they really want this to work, let's work this time around," and it did.

My wife is 24 hours away by freeway in a supposedly halfway decent hotel (a Comfort Inn, I'm told) but I'm afraid if it's a vague issue with their router or firewall there's not much that can be done to troubleshoot it.

Quite frankly, why can't the connection tunnel between the two machines an do a direct connection?? Why is this so difficult to get working?

I wanted to use iChat because iChat is relatively simple to use. It's a damn shame Apple can't seem to get around this video error that apparently plagues so many users.

But if you're interested in the fix that involved not screwing with your router or bandwidth allocation to Quicktime or any of that other bulls#@ you shouldn't have to play with, use Skype. It's free to use the chat function, it's multiplatform, and most of all, we managed to get a video connection up and running within ten minutes while really ticked off at running into the video error issue for the umpteenth time.

I love the Mac. I love it for home users. I don't hesitate to recommend it for non-gamers out there who just want to get their work done, especially for people who want to edit home movies or just browse the web and read email. But Apple really has a couple issues where I think their programmers suffer from a cranial-rectal inversion, and the inability to voice/video chat reliably from iChat is one of them.