Posted by robert on January 06, 2008 at 05:33 PM
It's one of those things, for the past year I have been struggling to get iChat video-conferencing to work with my father in the Netherlands. After wasting another 3 hours today I finally discovered the culprit; the UPnP setting on our Belkin wireless router. I turned it off after having tried all suggested solutions out there on Mac-related forums and it turns out that it solves my problem, both on my G5 and all the other machines in the network.
So for all Mac users out there with a Belkin wireless router (and possibly other routers with similar configurations) and an 'error -8' after trying to start an iChat videoconference, this one's worth a try. Note that the problem persisted with iChat after the upgrade from Tiger to Leopard.
One day everything ZeroConf and UPnP will work in beautiful harmony and the use of internet-based services around the home will be a bliss, both in terms of ease-of-use and in terms of security (about the same as hoping for world peace...) I hope the above suggestion is at least useful to someone out there.