Almost two months ago, I was thinking about the current state of videoconferencing on the desktop. Today, I downloaded iChatAV beta. The seamless nature of the VC features in iChatAV was actually scary. As soon as a friend with a FireWire camera sent a video call, I was looking at him, 320x240, 20fps, full audio, no stutters, frame loss or otherwise. The video can be toggled fullscreen, and looks as good or bett Almost two months ago, I was thinking about the current state of videoconferencing on the desktop.Today, I downloaded iChatAV beta.The seamless nature of the VC features in iChatAV was actually scary. As soon as a friend with a FireWire camera sent a video call, I was looking at him, 320×240, 20fps, full audio, no stutters, frame loss or otherwise. The video can be toggled fullscreen, and looks as good or better than any VC I’ve done with standard h323 tools. Both of us were using Airports and TiBooks. Truly wireless video conferencing.I was poking around, looking for the transport. Jobs’ said that iChatAV was standards-based… a protocol analysis showed streams of h323 UDP packets flowing to my friend’s cablemodem, with the chat session through AOL’s AIM servers. iChat had pierced both of our firewalls to permit direct connect UDP h323 streams — at least, that’s what it appeared to be; it was late and we only stayed on for 5 minutes. Apparently, the UDP stream is catalyzed by iChatAV. According to this Apple Knowledge Base article, all that’s necessary is that UDP 5060 and 16384-16403 be permitted. Note that they are all outbound; no inbound necessary. We didn’t touch the firewalls.This is exactly what I was talking about two months ago. iChatAV is definitely proprietary; it’s limited to FireWire (DV standard) cams and Mac OS X 10.2.x, but it works like a champ. Bandwidth limiting, video pausing, video and still capture. Just about everything you could ask for… and it’s a beta. I guess I will be adding an iSight to that G5. Sheesh. I feel like a cheerleader, but from a company that couldn’t spell internet protocol 5 years ago to this is really amazing. Panther, with BSD 5.0 compat, GCC 3.3, etc, etc is exactly the right way for Apple to go. Who knows? With the introduction of the G5, the 64-bit desktop market is getting crowded. Although Jobs’ noted that the 970-based G5 is the “first desktop 64-bit chip”, there’s more to it than that. Intel’s Itanium will make for great Edsel comparisons, AMD’s Opteron will make for great x86 workhorse servers, and maybe Apple’s G5 will make for a lot of eBay auctions of Sun Ultras, IRIX and big AIX workstations. When the big apps get moved over, like CATIA and Pro/E, the world will be a very different place. On the server end, don’t those IBM blade servers run the 970? Hmmm.