iSight Experiences

I recently picked up an iSight for my girlfriend and nabbed a spare one from work (which, of course, will be returned... eventually) and started exploring the wonderful world of iChat A/V.

All in all, I'm quite impressed - it's one of the few handy-dandy out-of-the-box Mac OS X things that makes me really very glad I have a G4 laying around. It's easy enough for everybody, and it actually makes this temporary long-distance situation between C. Rose and I quite a bit easier. I enjoy it for audio over a cell phone, and the video quality is shockingly good.

I have heard that it works much better between to OS X boxes than between OS X and Windows (or as the guy at the store said, "Mac to PC" - seriously, people, PC is not the inverse of Mac - but that's a rant for another time), so I assume that there must be some major scheduling hacks going on in the kernel to make it so silky-smooth.

The one significant problem, though - and it's a doozy - is that iChat now sporadically causes my Linksys Wireless-G router to take a hard dive. The lights on the front panel keep blinking, but connection between LAN and internet goes away. At first I blamed Cox, the famously questionable service provider, but I found that power cycling my router results in the problems going away.

This is a pretty perplexing situation, and thus far I haven't Googled up any explanation. Will post on further information.