A Short Review

A little late?

Yes, I know, this is a little late for a review of the iSight, but as you’ll see, it’s the perfect timing for it. When you review a product that just came out you inevitably run into a lack of use for the item because there are no software solutions for it just yet. Now that people have taken the iSight’s QuickTime integration and run with it we’ll see just what you can do with it.==

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IChat AV

Of course, the big one here is iChat AV. This is what Apple made it for, really. With an iSight and iChat AV you can do video chats (new term for “video teleconferencing”) with people, and they don’t even have to have an iSight. They do, of course, have to have iChat AV.

So my first test was to ring up the first person in my buddy list with a green icon. This person had a microphone but no camera. No matter. One-way video chat to the rescue! He could have been furry and nekkid but I’ll never know because he only saw me. However, he posted a screenshot for me and it appears I came out okay on the other end. The only annoying problem is that the video stream kept dying on me but from what the FAQ at Evological says Apple knows about this so it should be fixed … someday.

I limited the bandwidth to 200Kbps after some time to make things go a little smoother and we could talk to each other perfectly fine. The video has a little lag, but I would expect that of any video stream over a network.

All in all, quite a fun experience.

Both of us were using iChat AV 2.0 in Panther on broadband.

GCam

Of course, this is a camera, right? With a camera I should be able to make videos from it, right? Enter GCam. GCam is a freebie (and for what it does, this is perfect) that lets you capture live video from your iSight (and supposedly audio, but it didn’t work for me the first time; I’ll fiddle later) and save it to your disk. It’ll even encode it for you on the way down. It’s very simple in that it’s just a big preview window with a record button. The options, numerous “tweaking” ones, are in the menus. You will never need them, but if you want them, they’re there.

EvoCam

This is the fun one. With EvoCam ($20; 15-day trial) you can setup a full-featured webcam complete with custom elements on the picture (which you can add, remove, and move around, as well as configure them). It even has an element for sensing movement that can be reduced to a certain part of the video (make it a security cam in a room with a fan, for instance). Very slick.

Delivery is nice as well in that you can FTP it to a webserver or use EvoCam as the webserver (or just save it to disk and use the normal Mac OS X webserver). When it uploads it can also upload a cumulative QuickTime movie of the pictures so far (another great security cam feature) and archive this per time period (customizable). I could sit here going over everything but it simply has everything you need for a webcam or a security cam except for scp uploads, but that’s slated for the “next version.”

QuickTime Broadcaster

Apple’s own QuickTime Broadcaster works with the beast as well, meaning you can stream live video, capture to disk, or relay to a QuickTime Streaming Server to broadcast everywhere.

Eternally useful

This gadget was just a little iChat accessory when it came out a few months ago. Now it’s capable of everything short of iMovie, and for a tiny little can that runs off FireWire, this makes this gadget just amazing, even if you don’t have broadband.