[Tom9810]

How important is it to have at least a good cable connection/wifi to use the video chat to someone? I have a good strong Comcast cable signal and the girlfriend is running ATT's DSL over in Illinois for the net, as she has Direct tv for her tv shows.(224 miles away). We try to video chat using our PB's, but its terrible. Serious slideshow going on. Skype works so much more fluidly. But we wanted to use our PB's to video chat. It did work a little better when I was over there for the holidays and we were sitting right next to each other on the couch heheheheeh, so I'm assuming its her 80's DSL.

[CanadianThomas]

its is most likely her upload speed. old dsl = crap. try going to speedtest.net on both and see what it say. also make sure nobody is going mad downloading torrents or the like.

[UKCatFan3]

i used video chat with wife from hong kong (mcd's free wifi!) to texas and it was perfect, no lag at all. from hotel in malaysia it was almost unusable. wifi connection (up, down and signal stability) makes all the difference.

[bazjeepers]

Have yoou taking your Blackberry PlayBook to the office and not able to use the Video Chat app? If so, RIM has post a nice knowledge base article for port settings and port forwarding.
BlackBerry PlayBook Video Chat uses the following ports and porting forwarding must be enabled for the application to work on a traffic restricted network:

• 443 (TCP)
• 3478 (TCP)
• 3478 (UDP)
• 45535 to 65535 (UDP)
• NOTE: Depending on the Network Address Translation (NAT) configuration for the network, additional ports may be used for video traffic.

[cbvinh]

I am fortunate to have two Playbooks in my possession. I never bothered to test Video Chat, as I have the same Blackberry ID for both, which prevented Video Chat from working in OS1.x.8. Now with OS2.0, Playbook PIN's can be used. Unfortunately, I was unable to make a call from one to the other.

To initiate a call, I put the Playbook PIN in the dialog box and hit Call. It would say Calling... and eventually end with "The person you called is not currently available".

I saved both Playbook PIN's as Contacts and both have the green Chat icon, which means Available.

So, my questions:

1. When initiating a call, does the Playbook ring? (I don't get any sounds.)
2. Both Playbooks are on the same wi-fi network. Is there any router setting that might prevent them from talking to each other via Video Chat?
3. I saw the previous posting about port forwarding. In the router I have, port forwarding must be tied to an IP address, which isn't useful for me since my Playbooks get dynamic IP's. How do I go about seeing if the problem is with the ports?

The router I have is a standard home router, Linksys Wireless-G Home Router, model WRH54G.

Thanks.

[cbvinh]

After turning off one of the Playbooks, the Contact indicator does go grey, meaning Not Available. It looks like the Playbooks log whether they're available or not, as expected. What's the missing component to get chat to work?

[kill_9]

Getting Started with Video Chat in BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 �Inside BlackBerry Help Blog
PlayBook Apps Support - BlackBerry PlayBook Applications Official Help

[FF22]

It may be that PIN alone is not enough when two pb's share a bbid????

Since I changed my 32's bbid the other day, I cannot test it as my units no longer share the bbid.

Maybe this was only Rim's way to allow folks to chat without having to reveal a possibly PRIVATE email address to someone else??? A number of us thought that the use of the bbid required exposing an email address unnecessarily.

[cbvinh]

@BB9700CA: Thanks for taking the time to respond but I've already read those pages and seen the tutorial, as indicated by my detailed list of steps. I was hoping for more insight.

@F2: One of the complaints people had about Video Chat was that you couldn't chat between two Playbooks sharing the same Blackberry ID, which is currently necessary to share purchased apps. RIM addressed this limitation in OS2.0 by allowing Video Chat with Playbook PIN's instead. Thanks for the offer to test.

Has anyone been able to Video Chat between two Playbooks sharing the same Blackberry ID and calling with the Playbook PIN's? If yes, then I can look into issues with my home router setup.

Thanks.