I bought an ADS Pyro 1394 Firewire web camera. It works with iChat A/V without any drivers or anything. Very cool.
They ship you the IOXperts Firewire Camera drivers but I’m not sure why you need them. Read on.
I’m able to do everything I want to do with just the drivers that are standard in Panther. (I’m running 10.3.1) Admitedly, all I want to do is iChat A/V, so Panther’s drivers are all I need. I just plugged the camera in, and everything was done.
I have two MacOS X systems, one has the IOXperts driver installed, and the other does not. Both give me fine performance. I haven’t seen any apps that the IOXperts drivers allow you to use, that Panther’s drivers won’t let you use.
The camera comes with some video conferencing software: iSpQ and iVisit. I’ve monkeyed around with both of them a little bit. I prefer iVisit because it seems no-nonsense and simple. It’s biggest problem is that its interface is clunky and overly complex. It has a minimum of like 3 different windows that pop up if you’re doing the simplest of video conferences. iSpQ seemed to be more commercial and i just didn’t get a good feel when I ran it the first time.
The good news is that both of them support the Pyro web cam with the Panther drivers and both support Windows users as well. That’s key for me: I can communicate with Windows people seemlessly.