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Need a program for Video chatting on a PC & a Mac?

I

Imola Ghost

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Mar 21, 2009
1,153
12
I have a Macbook and my wife has a Windows machine. What program can she and I use that will allow us to have live video chats between to two machines?

Will iChat work on her PC?

Will Microsoft's Live Messenger work on my Mac?
 
We just tried it and once installed on my Macbook when we started the call all I could hear was static on my speakers.

When she installed Skype on her Windows 7 RC machine, Skype crashed the PC.

We also just installed Live Messenger for each of our machines and the Live Messenger for the Mac's does NOT support video chat.

Anything else?
 
i think mercury messenger supports video thru msn... not sure never tried it tho but I think i read that somewhere.. maybe google it?
 
Skype ran fine for me on Windows 7, has she tried the latest beta version?

I would say skype is easily the best to go with, I'm surprised it "crashed the PC" considering 7 is supposed to be so stable.
 
yes, well it crashed Internet Explorer 8 or whatever the latest version is. I believe she said it needed to disable some add-on that Skype had installed.

I really thought that this would be easy! My wife is not so computer literate and needs things a lot easier than I do or she gets frustrated. I thought buying a video camera and finding a program to work between the 2 different platforms would be simple, boy was I wrong.

Does someone know if I download the Mercury, if she needs to download it also? It would be nice for her to keep Live Messenger and then I'll just use the Mercury Messenger program.
 
We both were just using Skype but I had to use my mobile phone to talk because there was nothing but static going thru my Macbook's speakers.
 
Skype

I have it on my iMac and my PC, works fine to other users.

No problems video or audio
 
Skype works great for me as well.

Also try the video feature in gmail's gtalk. Works really great as well. Infact its replaced Skype for me.
 
Another vote for skype. When I was traveling a lot, and before we got an iMac for home (I have a macbook), it's what we used for video chatting. I read all sorts of articles about how to get iChat working with a PC application for video chat, but never got it to work. Skype worked.
 
Three best choices are:

1. Skype. If you have audio problems get the Windows user to untick the silly box in audio settings which lets Skype adjust the volume - it doesn't work very well!
2. Windows user on AIM, Mac user on iChat with an AIM login (which is free to make).
3. Yahoo.

These are the three I've used most and all are quite popular networks so useful to have anyway. MSN doesn't work at all and the Gmail chat seems to flake out a bit on OSX during long chats (might be my setup).
 
Imola Ghost said:
I have used Skype and would prefer to use it but on my Macbook all I have is some type of static coming thru the speakers.
Click to expand...

Was that your problem though or hers (given that hers crashed)?

Does it happen in the Skype test call? It might just be a configuration thing in the Skype settings.

If it's a no go, I'd tell her to get AIM and you can set up iChat with an AIM account for yourself (easy). That gives you the slightly harder job, which sounds like the best deal if she doesn't like tinkering with computers much.
 
Imola Ghost said:
yes, well it crashed Internet Explorer 8 or whatever the latest version is. I believe she said it needed to disable some add-on that Skype had installed.
Click to expand...

That is not a crash at all, it is just IE8 reporting an incompatibility with the skype plugin. Just choose the option to never use the plug-in. This plugin just gives you the ability to click on a phone number on a web page and skype will automatically dial it. You don't need it.

I use skype all the time to have video chats with my sister - she's running XP and I OS X. It works really well.
 
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