Using the iSight Cam with msn messenger

Hi,

The iSight doesnt work with MSN at all, it doesnt with Adium either!

It should work with iChat however.

Gavin.

Welcome to the forums, queenbean: You would do better posting this to the iChat forum as there are one or two in there who have some first rate experience of this. The short answer is that you are not doing anything wrong, but to connect MSN to iChat needs a lot of patience, a Jabber account, some prayers and a fair amount of work.

To give you an idea of what it entails, have a look at Henry Bennet's site, although his suggested Jabber service "xmpp.ws" did not work for me where I am and I ended up with hot.chilli.de (from memory).

This is really something that MS and Apple should have got to grips with a long time ago, in my opinion.

Hi Queenbean,

Like you, I am also new to Mac, and I have the same problem. I have tried watching some tutorials in youtube, by downloading a peace of software but it did not work with iChat, I could not make my msn work in msn... did you find a solution yet?

As a note on Gavsta's correct comment, there have been rumours about new features in an upcoming version of MSN, but only for Intel Macs. There is also an Open Source application called aMSN that will work with iSight, but it is a little unstable most of the time. Adium also has a plugin called Mebeam that works via a web page link (slowly).

Welcome to Discussions, queenbean

(A.) I suggest you uninstall Microsoft Messenger for Mac.

MSN Messenger for Mac does not support video except via Office Communications Server 2007 (usually paid for by commercial enterprises rather than individual users), it is possible to video with your friends who use the PC version of the MSN Messenger family of apps. Here are a couple of ways you can try:



(A1) Take a look at    aMSN   and    Mercury

Either can do webcam video with your built-in iSight.



They work a bit differently, so use whichever you find easiest or most reliable on your MBP.



(A2) As an alternative, because your iNtel Mac can use Boot Camp, VMware Fusion™, Parallels™, or VirtualBox to run Windows® software, you can choose which method you want to use, add the required software to your iNtel Mac (if you have not already done so), and then install and use the same Windows® Messenger application that your contacts use.



If you need more help with Boot Camp than you get here, search or post in Boot Camp discussions category



(A3) If your friends are willing to try something "new and improved" (does NOT work with Messenger):

you can both install and try a different video chat app such as Google Talk or Skype.


(B.) To configure GMail (Google Talk) to work with iChat via Jabber, follow the instructions here:

  http://www.google.com/support/talk/bin/answer.py?answer=24076

(C.) If you are still having problems, you (or your chat contact) may be having system problems. Consider the suggestions in this post:

  http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10161551&#10161551

(D.) Alternatively to (C.), you can use Google Talk on your iNtel Mac as explained here:

  http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100173&hl=en

(E.) We will watch for your status update. Hopefully, you can soon report all is well!

EZ Jim




Mac Pro Quad Core (Early 2009) 2.93Ghz w/Mac OS X (10.6.1)  MacBook Pro (13 inch, Mid 2009) 2.26GHz (10.6.1)
G5DP1.8GHz (10.5.8) G4 PowerBook 1.67GHz (10.4.11) iBookSE 366MHz (10.3.9) LED Cinema Display External iSight

queenbean wrote:
Hi All,

Thank you all for your replies they have been most helpful. So far whilst waiting for MS n apple to sort this out I have tried downloading amsn which worked great on my dell mini 9 however will not even start up on my mbp ...

I have a version of vmware fusion but I am a bit reluctant to install that as its not really a neat solution.

so now I am looking into mercury and/or using jabber to add my msn contacts...

I will keep you updated.

Thanks again

You're welcome, queenbean

We will watch for your status update.

EZ Jim




Mac Pro Quad Core (Early 2009) 2.93Ghz w/Mac OS X (10.6.1)  MacBook Pro (13 inch, Mid 2009) 2.26GHz (10.6.1)
G5DP1.8GHz (10.5.8) G4 PowerBook 1.67GHz (10.4.11) iBookSE 366MHz (10.3.9) LED Cinema Display External iSight