Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’ve participated in a multi-way iChat video conference before and it’s damn cool. A friend of mine got an iSight yesterday so we decided to try the multi-way conference. To do that I knew we needed a host with a G5 so I contacted another friend to try it out. We couldn’t get connected because of the famous “insufficient bandwidth” error message, which was pretty crazy since we all have relatively speedy cable connections and some of us were able to chat just fine with others of us one-on-one, while others weren’t. It was weird and complex to explain, and since it’s not the point of this post, I won’t get into it.

Somewhere along the way we looked up the specs for the host in the iChat documentation to make sure the person hosting our chat had the appropriate hardware. Here’s what iChat help said:

To host a multiperson video conference, you need any G5 computer, or a 1 GHz dual processor G4. In addition, you need an Internet connection that supports a minimum download bandwidth of 384 Kbps, and a minimum upload bandwidth of 384 Kbps.

OK, that’s clear. But then we found this elsewhere in iChat help:

To support hosting a multiperson video conference, you need a Dual 1 GHz G4 or a Dual 2 GHz G5. In addition, you need an Internet connection that supports a minimum download bandwidth of 384 Kbps (128 Kbps per participant), and a minimum upload bandwidth of 1000 Kbps (300 Kbps per participant).

So which is it? A Dual 1 GHz G4 is a consistent requirement, but do I need just a G5 or a dual 2 GHz G5? (Requiring a dual 2 GHz G5 or a dual 1 GHz G4 opens up a whole other set of questions itself, if that’s accurate.) A download bandwidth of 384 Kbps is consistent, but in one set of requirements you need 384 Kbps up, and 1000 Kbps up in another. What are the real requirements for multi-way video chat?

Its time for someone at Apple to proofread this help documentation and include it in the next update.