Sharing iTunes Folders
Doug, Lion's Head, ON

Q: If I have two users that login to the mac, and they both want to share music on itunes, where do i put the music that i load into iTunes? In tthe “shared” folder ? Is there two seperate music folders created on the Mac? And if i screw this up will it cause a kernel panic like i'm getting? Thanks Leo!

You're on the right track. You can tell iTunes where to look for its music library. Store the library in a location accessible to both users (i.e. not inside either's home folders) then change their itunes to point to it. If any of the music is from the itunes Music Store or otherwise copy protected, you'll need to authorize each copy of iTunes separately. Not sure what's causing the kernel panic, but it's not this.

Video Conferencing
Keith, Ottawa, ON

Q: I am curious as to what options are available regarding high-quality (public) ip-based video conferencing. I would think that 24–30 FPS,320*240–1024*768+, and "FM" mono audio would be the minimum desired quality. Peripherally, an open standards-based and "quality adjustable" solution would also be nice, to allow interoperability bothbetween OSes (Windows v*.*, Linux, Mac, et al), and people with varying hardware and Internet connection speeds.

The problem here is that the IETF video conferencing standards h.323 (IP), h.320 (ISDN), and h.324 (POTS) are considered ungainly by many companies, causing them to write their own, proprietary, and incompatible standards. AIM, Yahoo, Apple's iChat, and MSN Messenger are all non-standard and use imcompatible switching and videoconferencing techniques. (Well iChat works with AIM, but that's it.)

There are standards based solutions, but they don't work as well. Take a look at ineen, http://ineen.com. It's Windows, Mac, and PocketPC only at the moment, but because it uses the standard SIP and H.323 protocols, it should work with non-proprietary solutions on other platforms.

If you and your company are interested in promoting standards based video conferencing, you should probably attend IMTC's Spring Interop, June 13–17 in Belleville. http://www.imtc.org/h320.htm

Capturing Video
Carl, Charlottetown, PE

Q: I want to play a video file on my laptop and capture it on my desktop using my capture card and connecting through fire wire.

I understand what you're doing but not why you're doing it. You already have a copy of the video on your laptop. Why not just copy it to your desktop. If you want to capture your laptop's screen as video, you can't do it via firewire. The laptop's video is not coming out the firewire port. Most likely you have an analog VGA or video signal coming out the back of the laptop. You'll need a analog to digital converter that can take the laptop input and convert it to bits for your desktop.

You can also download a free trial, or check out HyperCam - video capture software that records AVI movies directly from your monitor, supports text annotations, sound, and screen notes, and lets you select frame rate and compression quality prior to video capture. http://hyperionics.com/