Wednesday, July 06, 2005

Life can be tough as a dedicated Mac user. It's true we have the best-looking PCs on the market and we have usability that any Windows user would sell his or her own grandmother for; but there are some times that are almost impossible to do on a Mac that anyone with a Windows-based PC can do within seconds. Last night I finally lost my battle to get a web-cam to work with any Mac MSN client out there.

It should be easy. Plug in a USB web-cam and open MSN Messenger; within seconds i could be chatting via video to my mates around the world (not that any of them live further afield than Wigan). Not so if you 'think differently'. For a start the range of Mac-compatible web-cams is tiny compared to Windows ones.

Secondly (you might be surprised to discover if you use the PC version) the Mac version of MSN Messenger doesn't actually support audio and video in any way shape or form; in fact there are loads of cool features us Mac-heads don't get to share in but don't get me started on that right now.

There are several Mac clients out there that let us Mac-users access the MSN Messenger network and give us access to loads of the features we miss out on by not being Windows users. Web-cam support, it turns out, ain't one of them. In fact the only one that makes an attempt at handling web-cams is an open-source one called Mercury.

Mercury is turns out is one of the most clunky hard to use programs out there; not helped by the fact that its ability to handle web-cams is about as good as my ability to carry boiling hot soup in my bare hands, it fails to work with pretty about any Mac-compatible USB web-cams. It's shitty forums and support section don't help much either.

So it looks like if I wanna use my web-cam online I'm gonna have to persuade my mates to move over to Yahoo Messenger. Despite MSN being unable to make video work through their network it seems that the people at Yahoo can. Shame none of my mates use it.

Posted by Antz at 1:12 PM | Permalink | | |

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