Chax is a great plugin for iChat which provides several options for customizing the iChat interface and behavior, including the latest big improvements - tabbed chat windows and auto-resizing of the contact lists. As the Norwegian localizer for this plugin it happens that I receive questions related to features and possible future improvements. Unfortunately, I’m not exactly the one whom to contact, but it do happen that I can provide some descent answers. This is an attempt of one
One question which have popped up more than once is the availability of video support between MSN and iChat (via Jabber). As most Mac/iChat users know, iChat provides a great interface for video chat between iChat users (although it is not very tolerant when it comes to bandwidth issues, as far as I have seen). Although iChat has support for video, this support works only between iChat clients due to the way the video streams are sent.
There are some ongoing work in the Jabber community to come up with a way to send video streams between Jabber clients, but this does unfortunately not help that much (since both MSN and iChat uses their own approaches).
There are some other clients/networks which provides this functionality, but I haven’t tested them. The reason for this is that I do not want to have several clients running. Currently I have two, iChat and Skype, and I do not want more clients than this running. My best bet when it comes to hassle free videoconference between Mac and Windows users is to wait for Skype to finally launch their 2.0 version of the Skype client. This is scheduled to happen in this quarter (April-May-June), and I hope they make this happen.
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