Video Monitoring with iChat, an eMac, and a Cheap USB Camera

As my Mac is in a room not attached to our house, I had setup iChat as an audio-only intercom so my kids could easily contact me at night when I’m working out there and my wife’s not home. Plus it lets me keep an ear on them. But I wanted more, I wanted video too. Their computer is an eMac so recently I bought a cheap webcam to add to the monitoring, mainly to give my paranoid self a bit more peace of mind that they are okay.

One of the best upgrades for iChat is Leopard. However, a few things are still missing, especially for me to get video monitoring working. Two clever and very useful apps to the rescue!

Chax
I searched Apple Matters and was surprised to find we’ve never looked at this app. A bit of a passing mention was made of it a few years ago, but that’s all. And yet it’s an app that gets rave user reviews wherever you look.

I guess it’s the sort of app you don’t discover until you have a need it can fulfill. Here’s a list of its features.

• Unified contact list shows all contacts from all accounts in one window
• Growl notifications for new messages and users changing status
• Automatically resize the contact list to fit the number of visible users
• Built-in log viewer
• Activity log that displays your contacts’ status changes
• Auto-accept file transfers, AV chats, and screen sharing requests
• Toggle text status visibility of users
• Always on top option for contact list, message windows, and AV chats
• Set font of names, status messages, and group separators
• Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window
• Show status changes directly in the message window
• Additional unread message notifications in the Dock
• Automatically go away when the screensaver activates
• Properly use ICQ accounts without sending text formatting in messages

Many iChat users should find something useful on that list.

For me, the need that led me to Chax was the Always on Top feature, as my monitoring was hindered by the iChat window getting covered by other applications, so I had to remember to arrange the windows to keep it uncovered. Although only a mild inconvenience, in the end I wondered if anything could make the iChat window always on top of other windows. And so I found Chax. Problem solved.

USBCam
The second app to make this system work was iChatUSBCam from Ecammm Network, who also make a few other cool apps for the Mac.

iChatUSBCamm makes any Mac-compatible USB webcam work with iChat. Some modern USB webcams do already work with iChat if they are UVC (USB Video Class) compliant. However, I bought the cheapest Mac-compatible webcam I could find, so after the disappointment of finding out iChat is a snob, I was really stoked to find iChatUSBCam and get that camera working in iChat.

By the way, the other and easiest part of setting up the monitoring is a simple matter of setting up a Bonjour chat session through iChat.

Overall, being a cheap camera, the picture and frame rate are poor, but for the overall cost, I’m now as happy as a pig in mud. And the kids are much happier too, being able to see me when they get up in the night.