The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Everyone’s talking about the iPhone (although no one is talking with it yet), and while this article is about communication, this is the last sentence that will mention the iPhone. For the moment, pass on, you hordes of latest gadget-lovers! We have other fish to fry. Last Website Wednesday Night we had a caller bring up the question of video conferencing between Macintosh OS X and Windows XP. In the past we’ve promised we’d share at least one way to make this work, and today is that day.

The objective is to get Windows and Mac to be friends and play nice together, share audio and video. Cross-platform video conferencing is a hot topic these days, until now it almost seemed impossible, at least inexpensively. Recent version os AOL promised compatibility, however, it was short-lived, if it ever worked well.

Well… with some research I’ve found a simple solution: Skype the popular internet P2P (person-to-person) calling software now offers video chat with their most recent release, and guess what? It works on both platforms, and it’s *free!* If you haven’t already, let’s not just get our feet wet, but dive in together and take a look at the wonderful world of Skype.

Assuming you have a friend with the “other” platform, point your respective browsers to Skype to download the most recent version. Version 2.0 for mac and Version 3.0 for windows. Next, let’s run the proper installers and finish up installation. Now, we have to register a user name… this is pretty straight-forward stuff so far, right? Be sure to tell your video conferencing friend what your Skype username is, and vice versa. Now comes the fun part… both you and your buddy should log into Skype. Now your buddy’s screen will look like this on his/her Windows PC:

Have your buddy add you to the list of users. Then, ask your friend to initiate a call with you once you become available. To do this, note you must click on the little green phone icon next to your friend’s name and click “place a Skype call.” Once you accept the call on your mac you are Skyping! Now, both you and your buddy can start a video chat by clicking on “start video.” I might add I look very handsome today…

…if I do say so myself. As you can see in the screenshots below, I was successfully able to call Andrew on his intel Mac from our office Windows PC. The first screen is the screenshot from windows and the second is his shot from the intel mac.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 12:22 am and is filed under Apple/Mac, Basic, Cross-platform, How To, Mac help, Microsoft, OS X, Quick-tip, Tutorial, Video, WGN Radio Show Notes, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.