September 24th, 2004
iChat Black Screen
I post this in case anyone else finds themselves with the same problem.
Recently (not sure when) my copy of iChat stopped working properly - it would not accept video from my FireWire webcam. All that was shown was a black screen:
Strangely the camera worked as expected in other QuickTime apps:
I tried re-installing iChat and trashing prefs - but nothing helped.
It turns out that the problem was with an old version of a bit of software called SIMBL. (SIMBL is installed as part of the PithHelmet Ad-Blocker.)
Install the new version of SIMBL and all is well again.
Frank says:
I have a similar problem with iChat giving me a black screen. I can get it to work by loading iMovie and importing a one second clip. If I do this repeatedly (switching to iChat each time to see if it worked) I can video conference usually wihtin 30 minuntes of starting the procedure.
I don’t have SIMBL installed, so I was wondering if you could tell me how you found the conflict so that I could try and find what’s wrong with my system.
thanks
Frank
October 17th, 2004 at 4:26 pm