I bought an iSight camera when it was announced, but I was taken aback when I discovered that it would only work if I had a .Mac or AOL account. It was gathering dust, until I discovered VChat on VersionTracker.

We're now trying out VChat between two Macs on a Local Area Network with an iSight camera at one end and a Canon Optura DV camera on the other end. From the announcement and documentation, it was not clear whether that would work. They talked only about USB and didn't mention FireWire cameras.

It took us a little while to figure out that we had to uncheck the "Fix IP Address Mismatches" option in the Preferences window, as VChat would either disconnect or crash, regardless whether we clicked "Cancel" or "Correct" when the Mismatch window came up. But with that option disabled, it's working like a charm.

For an Alpha release, VChat is surprisingly stable and polished! Better than many commercial products. VChat offers a rich user interface with many options for tweaking performance, but most users will need to make few or no changes to the default settings for basic operation, and it's very easy to use once configured properly. Support for Rendezvous would make local setup even easier. The present absence of support for Rendezvous and audio may be the only reasons this fine product has not advanced to the Beta release stage, but it is quite functional and very usable in its current implementation.

Cheers!