Few Questions about Built-in iSight

[Benjamindaines]

I opened up System Profiler and discovered that that new built-in iSight is hooked in through USB. Is this yet another sign that FireWire is on its way out? Could you take the version of iChat from a new iMac, put it on another computer and use any USB web cam?

 

[mkrishnan]

I opened up System Profiler and discovered that that new built-in iSight is hooked in through USB. Is this yet another sign that FireWire is on its way out? Could you take the version of iChat from a new iMac, put it on another computer and use any USB web cam?

You *might* be able to hack it, and it *might* work, but we definitely won't help you with it, because it is hardly likely to be consistent with your user license. In particular, just because iChat was modified to allow the iSight to work via USB, doesn't mean that Apple was nice and made the modifications robust enough to make your camera work. In fact, I don't even think iChat sees the fact that the camera is USB or FW. It's just that the system has webcam drivers for the FW cams and not the USB ones. This is especially likely considering that other apps, like iMovie and Photobooth, also use the iSight.

And so it's probably more likely that there's a kernel extension somewhere that allows the iSight to work over USB.

But back to the point, Ecamm's iChatUSB is probably your better bet. It is very inexpensive, and it works.

Good luck!