Resurrecting iChat Audio and Video Conferencing

jadar

This is awesome! I remember trying to figure out how this worked as a kid, and never made headway. Today my dream was realized. ;)

mulanroo

SNATMAP is essentially Apple's version of STUN (RFC 3489, also 2003): learn your public IP and port from an outside server, swap them over chat, then both sides send packets at once to punch through NAT. That's why port-preserving NAT matters. Carrier-grade NAT, common on mobile and some ISPs, assigns a new port per destination and breaks it. Modern WebRTC falls back to a TURN relay, but iChat had none, so if calls still fail after the hosts fix, check for CGNAT on either end.

penskymaterial

A time warp to when video conferencing actually worked, as opposed to every new release of FaceTime now being some kind of avant-garde art experiment with the UI being increasingly impossible to use for both technical and non-technical users. The last straw for me was making the recents/contacts as confusing as it was, and I personally made some accidental calls to former contacts that for some reason were made front and center. I expect the next version will hide even more controls behind a new, indecipherable icon that looks like a 2D abstract pair of testicles.