Back in my PC days, I had been using a combination of Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger to see and talk to my parents. This meant that come chat time every weekend there was a fair amount of fumbling with the microphone and webcam. This was one of my things I was looking forward to avoiding with my shiny new iMac. After all it has a built in camera and microphone.
However, I have been sorely disappointed -- for no fault of Apple.
Yahoo messenger (v3.0 beta 1) for the Mac supposedly supports video and chat. However, I have had no luck getting it to play nice with the messenger (on Windows) being used by my parents. While they can see my video I see nothing from their side.
After a bit of Googling, I found that a lot of dissatisfied users have switched to Fire or Adium. While Fire has been put out (hehe), Adium clearly states that it doesn't support voice or video and -- for the foreseeable future -- won't do so. In fact, they refer the reader to gaim-vv.
Now gaim-vv seems pretty dead since the last update was made in Oct 2005. The last note there said that they are going to merge back to the parent gaim project. So I tried their web site which and found that they are now calling themselves Pidgin. Reading about it brought me back a full circle as they redirect Mac users to...Adium :-(.
However there seems some hope albeit requiring a bit of manual work. I need to try it out.
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