IceCam and the iChatUSBCam Software

A Review by Rick Rudge

Ever since I first saw a video telephone being demonstrated at the Seattle Worlds Fair, I thought that this was way cool! When I got a chance to try it out first hand at Disneyland's Tomorrowland, I was hooked.

I've moved around a lot, so I have friends scattered all over the country and the world, and having video is just like being there with them. Forget the jet-pack. I wanted my video telephone. But, those things were always expensive, and theoretically, you needed to buy two of them (one for you and one for your friend).

Imagine my surprise when Apple came out with iChat AV. Being able to instant message, use your Mac's built-in microphone like a speaker phone to talk with your friends, and now, using a video camera to see your friends while you chat with them. This was like a dream come true for me.

But with that capability, comes a high price. It used to be, your friends would have to use a Macintosh also, but actually you can now video conference with your Windows friends. They only need to upgrade their AOL Instant Messaging software. You also have to pay for a broadband internet connection. Well, I've seen some poorer quality using just dial-up accounts, perhaps I can squeak by without having to get that.

The next thing that you need is a FireWire camera (the newer Macs come with a built-in camera). Apple also sells their iSight FireWire camera, but it's around $150 – $200. You can also use a regular handheld digital video camera that uses FireWire. iChat AV won't let you do video conferencing with a simple USB webcam--or will it?

The iSight is definitely the holy grail of web cameras for the Macintosh. It offers a great 24-bit VGA 30 frame per second video image, auto focus, and a built-in microphone. The fact that Apple makes it for the Mac, means that there are no worries about incompatibilities. There are cables and attachments for whatever type of Mac that you own and it works perfectly with your iChat AV.

The iSight has some steep requirements too. You need to have a 600MHz G4 or faster Macintosh with a FireWire connection. With those great graphics, you will need to have a faster (at least 128Kbps) broadband internet connection (cable or DSL) to send all of that data through.

But, what do you do if you don't have that fast of a processor or broadband, and you don't want to pay $150 for one of those iSights? Is there a cheaper alternative to the iSight/iChat/broadband scenario? I've been doing some experimenting and here's what I've found.

Enter the IceCam I may have found a solution with the IceCam, a simple and inexpensive USB 1.1 web camera by Macally. This (under $30) device is about the size of a bic disposable lighter and is attached to a 15" flexible reinforced USB cable that plugs into any USB 1.1 port.

macally.com

You can adjust the angle of the cable (sort of like a coat hanger wire) to fit your particular needs, positioning the camera around your Mac, where ever you want. You can manually sharpen the picture by adjusting the tiny lens. This camera is small, light, and portable, perfect for carrying around with your laptop.

The IceCam comes with a CD of various drivers for both Windows, Mac OS9, and OS X. The Macally software can make all kinds of adjustments to your IceCam from Gamma brightness to individual color strengths, to various allowable resolutions. They have a digital zoom, but this merely enlarges the pixels. There are various compression set-ups for recording your videos as one of those video emails.

I tried creating a video file with mixed results. You really need a fast Mac for this, and the size of a short video message is several MegaBytes--not conducive to sending in an email to your other dial-up friends.

The IceCam worked well with Yahoo! Instant Messenger. I was able to text chat with my friends (no voice chat, unfortunately), see their cam and have them view mine at the same time. This was with me using a 400MHz PowerMac (Using Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther) on broadband and my friend using some kind of Windows PC. The images are a bit broken up and kind of jerky, but nothing very bad. That is to be expected by a USB webcam on a slower Mac. But, being able to see each other is great.

The iChat USBCam software Using the IceCam with the Mac's iChat is another story. The Mac's iChat AV program was only set up to run with FireWire cameras. As far as using iChat AV with your IceCam, you will first need a third-party software program to be able to get IceCam to work on iChat AV. The program, iChatUSBCam is a free demo download from the Ecamm Network's website:

ecamm.com

iChatUSBCam is a hack that works within iChat AV and makes it possible for iChat AV software to recognize the non-FireWire camera and to use it inside iChat AV. Ecamm has a huge list of webcams that iChatUSBCam supports. IceCam is listed prominently, and in fact makes it possible for you to get a discount on the purchase of iChatUSBCam if you just give them the serial number off of the camera.

I used the IceCam, iChatUSBCam, and iChat AV from my work and it came out terrible. My video image was jerky, reminiscent of M-M-MMax Headroom. The images would jerk back and forth, several seconds behind real-time. Both my friend and I could use voice as we used the video though. There was a lot of flickering. Like I said before, the IceCam is only a USB 1.1 that has a very slow throughput. On top of that, the Mac that I was using was only a 400MHz PowerMac--but being able to use any kind of video with a slower Mac is quite an accomplishment.

I tried iChat AV3 on my 1GHz PowerBook from the PMUG office's broadband connection and I wasn't able to use this at all. Strangely, I wasn't even able to connect with anyone inside of the office, just using text, let alone voice, using this method either. Using my IceCam with my PowerBook on dial-up was impossible. There simply wasn't enough bandwidth to carry all of that video data through.

You can't imagine how cool it is to see the video icon come up next to my name inside of iChat. After seeing a much better image coming through Yahoo! IM, it's surprising and depressing to see how poor the quality is, making this work through the Mac's iChat AV.

The iChatUSBCam software has been updated to utilize Tiger OS, offering even more adjustment features inside of Tiger. Ecamm has even re-programmed its software to be Universal Binary, although why they would need to make that for Intel Macs, that already have iSight cameras is beyond me. It goes to show how well they support the Mac though.

A lot has to do with how busy these Instant Messaging servers get at night too. Thanks a lot to everyone at the PMUG office who helped me with this experiment.

The Final Evaluation Part of the problem, I think, is with Apple's iChat AV3. I've experienced some buggy problems with iChat AV3 that I didn't experience with the earlier versions of iChat. The iChat AV3 requirements are steeper than iChat AV2. I was hoping that iChatUSBCam would solve this problem, and make it possible to use a non-FireWire webcam on iChat, but it's not a miracle worker. iChat AV3 really has some high requirements and if you are below that minimum, it just won't work as well, period. If you go below the requirements, you know that you are taking your chances.

There are a lot of other possible reasons for the problems. It's not just Apple trying to get us to upgrade our equipment, or the bandwidth, but it's how busy the Instant Messaging server is that effects how much of your video and audio data can be moved to your friend's computer.

The fact that you can successfully use an alternative to iChat, Yahoo! IM, tells me that it's iChat that deserves part of the blame. The Yahoo! IM software doesn't have a very fancy interface, but it works. I know that Apple offers a nicer quality video conference experience, but I'm not asking for high definition here. If you don't have all of the steep hardware and broadband requirements that an iSight camera needs, you should really consider this 1.1 USB webcam by Macally and its partner software, Ecamm's iChatUSBCam.