Help: iChat Audio Chat Doesn't Work!

[Amie]

My friend and I were trying to initiate an audio chat via iChat. While we love iChat's user interface, and the text chat works just fine, we could not get the audio chat to work. Every time we sent each other an inivitation we kept getting a message saying that the other user "did not respond" (but we *did* respond; we hit the Accept option). We went to Apple.com's iChat tutorial site and found out that some ports needed to be open in Mac OS's firewall. He's running OS 10.4, and I'm running OS 10.3.9, so we each got our respective port numbers from the site and opened them in our firewalls. And tried it again. Audio chat *still* would not work. We've checked everything else: Mic is enabled, our systems have all the requirements, etc. Everything *looks* like it should work. We were both at public hotspot locations when we tried it. Could that be the problem? We don't know what else to do, as we've tried everything that we could think of. We even turned off our firewalls completely. Still no luck!

Any suggestions?

[bobw]

Being at a public spot could be the problem. You don't know what ports they allow.

here's a couple pages you can check out;

http://www.ralphjohnsuk.dsl.pipex.com/page1.html

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

[Amie]

Being at a public spot could be the problem. You don't know what ports they allow.

here's a couple pages you can check out;

http://www.ralphjohnsuk.dsl.pipex.com/page1.html

http://www.mvldesign.com/video_conference_tutorial.html

Well, you're just full of useful links, ain't ya?

Thanks, Bobw. I read the information contained in the sites that you posted--some of it I'd come across before while trying to solve the problem, and other info was new to me. Because I've went through all the processes before with resolving firewall port issues ... this leads me to deduce that it is, in fact, a public hotspot problem. And I guess there's nothing I can do about it. *sigh*

[Amie]

Update: After exploring several Web sites (including the two posted in this thread), and setting our firewalls accordingly, iChat AV still would not work. Text chat works fine; audio chat does not. We are still getting the "user did not respond" message when, in fact, we *did* respond.

Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be???

[Amie]

Why do they call it iChat AV (Audio/Video) if the damn thing doesn't even work? They should just call it iChat TX (Text). 'Cause that's the only feature on the program that works.

[bobw]

Why are you blaming iChat?
You're using public spots trying to connect, which would have the required ports closed.

[Amie]

Why are you blaming iChat?
You're using public spots trying to connect, which would have the required ports closed.

No, I *opened* the ports. And iChat *still* doesn't work properly. So, yes, I'm blaming iChat.

[bobw]

You opened the ports on the public spots router/system?
I doubt you were able to do that.