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by Jeff Hester
July 23, 2002Logitech released a new add-on that lets AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger users send and receive video.
IM Video Companion is a free application that works with basically any webcam. So how does it stack up? Well, I took it for a test drive and really liked what I saw. It was much faster than Yahoo’s video capability. It did, however, require some fiddling to get it to receive video through my firewall, but once thatproblem was solved, it worked like a charm.
The Buddy List
It reads your buddy list from MSN and AOL, and let’s you invite someone to see your cam. You must be logged in to your messenger first, or your lists will appear empty. For some reason, it is unable to fetch your AIM buddies if AIM isminimized system tray, so you might have to open it also.When I first started it, I didn’t have AIM running and it had a link on the AIM tab to launch it. A nice idea, unfortunately it didn’t work! I ended uplaunching AIM separately, and that worked fine.
Previewing Your Video
The preview window lets you see your camera, and gives you tools that adjust your camera settings, port settings, or see who is viewing your video. It’s
supposed to only allow invited viewers to see your cam, but I haven’t tested
it extensively to see if there are any holes in this, so use accordingly.*
Viewing a Friend’s Video
When you send an “invitation” to a friend, they will see a hyperlink in their IM window. Clicking it launches a new browser window that then opens another browser window sized for the video. You can then close the first window. I suspect they do this because the the hyperlinks sent to MSN or AIM don’t supportopening a browser window of a specific size.Other than that, it’s pretty cool. It lets you send your video to multiple friends, and view multiple friends all at the same time. Of course, the speed of your Internet connection will have an impact on performance, but on my DSL line it was the fastest, smoothest video I’ve seen. Very impressive.
It doesn’t provide any voice capabilities, but then, both MSN and AIM already have that functionality (and it doesn’t interfere with them). Their web site says that it requires MSN Messenger (not Windows Messenger) but my testing foundthat it did, in fact, work fine with Windows Messenger also.
Bottom Line
This is a nice little add-on from a reputable company. It works very well, even through firewalls. If you have a webcam and want to share video withfriends and family, it’s definitely worth a look.Related Links
- Download IM Video Companion
- Discuss in the Webcam Forum
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