ichat problem

[rz]

I know weekends aren't the best time to ask technical questions, but I thought I'd give it a try.

My wife's Macbook is having problems with iChat. When we try to do a video chat, the other side can see her, but she can't see them. Everything was working ok until this past week. She is running Tiger, with all the latest patches. We've tried this between her Macbook and mine, both on the same network, and on different ones. We tried it with her mother, who is a thousand miles away. Always the same issue: She can't see us, but we can see her. Her camera works fine (otherwise the other side couldn't see her). She can hear the other people, just no video. And we ruled out a network problem when I had no problem chatting with her mother, but she was sitting next to me with her macbook and couldn't see her.

I'm running Leopard on my Macbook, so the versions are different. But as I said, she's had no problems before. She probably video chats with her mother twice a week. Connection Doctor reports no problems. She said the problem surfaced after the last software update, which was for iPhoto and iTunes. But I don't know why either of those would cause the problem.

Any ideas? We may have to take it to the Genius Bar if we can't get this figured out.

[swampy]

I always had problems with iChat. Our family switched to Skype (free account) and now no problems.

[StingMe]

Have you rebooted and/or repaired permissions on your wife's MacBook?

Have you tried using your iChat account on your wife's MacBook, or your wife's on yours?

Create a new, temporary user account on the MacBook, test iChat under that account using the same iChat account info, and report back...

[rz]

created the new account and tried with her .mac account, and it has the same problem. Next I'll try using her account on my machine.

[rz]

ok, I tried her account on my machine, and it works. So it looks like there's a problem specific to her machine. Guess we'll try reinstalling iChat, or taking it to the Genius Bar.

[Article Accelerator]

Wait--have you repaired permissions then restarted?

Beyond that, check here:

http://www.aptr36.dsl.pipex.com/page15.html#_Preview

[rz]

RP and restart did nothing. I clicked that link, but nothing there was really helpful.

We'll probably take it to the Apple store to see if they can figure it out. Otherwise, maybe we'll buy her a copy of Leopard and hope that the problem goes away.

[rz]

Well, I installed Skype on her computer, and it works fine. So the problem is definitely with iChat.

[rz]

ok, final update. After trying to reinstall iChat from the Tiger CD and having that crap out, we just went ahead and bought a copy of Leopard for her. I told her Snow Leopard was coming soon, but she REALLY wanted to get iChat working again. We could've waited until tomorrow for an appointment at the Genius Bar, but she insisted. Besides, it's taken her this long to update to Leopard. It'll probably be a few years before she's ready for Snow Leopard.

iChat is now working fine.