iChat TV 2

Simon Thornton: A Mutual Misunderstanding

bq. The recent versions of iChat have, of course, brought with them the capability to use a video source (for most people, that would mean an iSight, or a USB webcam using a hack to get it to work in iChat – see my old post about that, or even perhaps a firewire-output home video camera they already own) for video chatting/conferencing. However, if you just so happen to be someone that has purchased an analogue video -> DV (firewire) converter box in the past, such as the Formac Studio, you might be suprised to learn that when it’s plugged in it is presented to the Mac (and specifically the iChat application) as a perfectly valid firewire input device. In other, shorter, easier, words: you can use your converter box to stream live video from something – oooh, let’s just say your Sky Digibox for example – to someone else using iChat anywhere else in the world. If you happened to have one of the outputs of your Sky box (it has two) connected up to the inputs of your converter box, you might see how this could work.

iChat broadcasting video – VERY COOL. I guess the real trick is to work out someway for iChat to open these streams on demand… though it would probably be a neat way to interactively watch TV (e.g. if your loved ones are so far, far away…)