A couple of weeks back I wrote about the issues I was having getting iChat AV working with services other than .Mac. Well, a few days ago, Alex and I finally managed to get it all working as intended.

This is what I learnt:

• Audio/visual (AV) chat is not supported over Jabber (I thought that it might work on a point-to-point basis as some commercial real-time collaboration products do – e.g. Microsoft Live Communications Server); however it does work using an ICQ account via the AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) transport within iChat AV.
• If your buddy keeps switching out of iChat into other IM programs (e.g. Adium) then it will break your testing… Despite having loads of nice features Adium doesn’t support AV.
• Some IM client combinations will render the conversation as raw HTML. That’s not very nice.
• After deleting a contact from my buddy list, I was having problems recreating it (and was receiving a bizarre Feedbag error 14 message). Eventually, I gave up trying to add the contact via iChat (on either the AIM or the Jabber transport) and instead installed the native ICQ client, added my contact, and then switched back to using iChat AV (which could then read the contact from my ICQ buddy list). Following this, the audio/video icons (and menu options), previously greyed out, were enabled and we were able to have an audio/video conversation.

There’s a conversation thread on the Apple Forums that describes some more of the troubleshooting steps that I went through.