Last night, I had the chance to participate in a 3-way (multiperson) video conference in iChat. In the past, 2-way, or one-on-one videoconferencing worked just fine. But I was unable to get the 3-way conference working!

My MacBook and internet connection met Apple’s minimum specifications for participating in, and even hosting, a multiperson videoconference. But users in my buddy list only had the single “video camera” icon next to their names, and not the “multi-video camera” icon, which would indicate that they could participate in a multiperson video conference in iChat.

I suspected my software firewall, and found that it was not allowing iChat to determine the speed of my internet connection. In that case, iChat defaults to the Streaming Speed setting in Quicktime. So, I went into the Quicktime Player preferences, and changed the Streaming Speed from Automatic (to which it was set) to 1.5 Mbps. Once I did that, I quit iChat, started it back up, and my buddies had “multi-video camera” icons next to their names. Then I started a video chat with one of them, and the previously-grayed-out “plus” button was no longer grayed out, meaning I could add more buddies to the video chat.

I did that and everything worked flawlessly. It was pretty difficult to find the solution on-line, so I’m posting this solution on my blog, hoping that others can find it and get their multiperson video chats in iChat working as well! Good luck!