I have a fairly unique situation. My girlfriend is deaf and I am not. We have been dating a while, but I am still learning sign language. She wanted to work on teaching me sign language at night with a webcam. We currently live in different states and have different computers. I have a G5 and she has a Sony running Windows XP Pro.
Since iChat was what shipped with the Mac, I assumed I would just be using that. Well, it turns out that unless you use an iSight or other FireWire camera, you won't be doing any video conferencing. I did find a site that sold a patch for iChat allowing USB webcam support, but for a fee. I tried loading the demo of that program to see if it would work. It did bring up video from my webcam with a big "DEMO" label in the video window, but I could not connect to the PC version of AIM with it. Hmph!
Next my girlfriend suggested I try using MSN Messenger. Yes, there is a free download version of MSN messenger for Mac, but it does not have webcam support. This also goes for the AOL Instant Messenger version you can download for Mac.
I have a lot of old Windows programs from my past, and purchased Virtual PC for Mac when I bought the G5. So I decided I would just download the Windows version of MSN Messenger in the virtual copy of Windows XP I have on my Mac. Then I could run the webcam through the virtual copy of Windows. Well, this also failed. I have read that this does work. However, it seems that Virtual PC does not support USB 2.0 devices? It's either that, or there was some system conflict over which operating system had control over my webcam. Foiled again! ARGH!
Finally, we settled on using Yahoo Messenger, which does have USB webcam support for Mac. Sadly, though, at only one frame per second. Try as I might, I could not improve the speed of the video in Yahoo. And let me tell you, if you have ever tried to do sign language at one frame per second, it just plain sucks! Makes you feel like you are living in slow motion after about three hours of that.
I was on the verge of giving up when I noticed a nifty piece of software. It's called Mercury Messenger. Mercury is a Java-based MSN and Jabber client. And it has USB webcam support for the Mac!
I loaded this program up, made a free MSN messenger account, and was almost in tears when I saw the video quality of the webcam connection. I could actually see webcam video that was running at around six frames per second. So finally, after weeks of struggling with this, it seems that this little application has solved my problem. No more agonizing slow motion sign language for me and my girlfriend.
So if anyone else is fighting with Mac to PC USB webcam support, and you don't want to pay extra for it, give this program a chance.

