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[Bug 1296705] Re: Amazon Prime Instant Video Does Not Work

 

Short version:
===========
Chrome and Firefox take different approaches to playing flash video with DRM and it fails to work in one or the other for different reasons.  Therefore, this should be filed as separate bugs:

1. Apparmor sounds like a Firefox specific issue.  I never had the
problem, so I wouldn't know.

2. Firefox, SRWare Iron, and other browsers that use the Adobe Flash
Plugin need hal installed to play DRM flash, which in turn is required
for Amazon Instant video to work.

3. Google Chrome changed its plugin architecture in such a way that
there is currently no known way to play DRM flash content on Linux.
This issue affects the version of Chromium shipped with 14.04, though
the version of Chromium in 13.10 falls under #2 above.  As of 2 days ago
(2014-06-17), this issue was still present in the google-chrome-beta
repository.  Chromium with the pepper flash installer just unpacks the
version of pepper-flash that comes from Google Chrome, so until Google
Chrome fixes this issue, Chromium isn't going to work.  I got sick of my
browser crashing though so I switched from google-chrome-beta to
-stable.


I think this bug report is about #2, so new bugs should probably be opened for #1 and #3, though I'm not sure anyone but Google can do anything about #3, unless someone can implement a DRM flash plugin using the pepper API from scratch.


Long version with additional data from my own experiments and several other sources:
========================================
Google Chrome is changing its plug-in architecture to something
called, "pepper" which the old Adobe Flash plug-in won't work with.
Google is making their own flash plug-in, but it doesn't support DRM
on Linux.  "Viewing Adobe Access (DRM) content is not supported, since
Adobe does not support it on Linux."
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/108086?hl=en

The quote is correct that Flash DRM no longer works in Chrome-based
browsers, but it also contains two lies: 1. Adobe's flash plug-in
supports DRM on Linux.  2. Chrome is not using the Adobe plug-in any
more.

SRWare Iron, apparently still uses the older plug-in architecture and
plays Flash with DRM just fine.  My friend sent me steps (below) to
make that work.

On the theory that Google Chrome Beta will have this issue fixed
first, I've been using that, though it crashes occasionally.  Is there
evidence that Google Chrome is even working to fix this issue?

Anyone have suggestions, updates, a sense of where and how this issue
will get fixed or what I can do to encourage someone to fix it?  Using
Firefox for Amazon Instant is not a good long-term work-around for me,
though I may have to make the best of it.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter
Date: Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 11:53 AM
Subject: Steps I took to play Flash DRM content on Firefox and Chrome
To: Glen

1) Deleted all versions of Chrome except SRWare Iron

2) Deleted Pepper Flash and any other Flash plugins on Ubuntu.

3) From this link:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2144347&page=2&p=12874114#post12874114

I did this:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mjblenner/ppa-hal
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hal

And then this:
sudo mkdir /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe
sudo mkdir /etc/hal/fdi/information
/usr/sbin/hald --daemon=yes --verbose=yes

And finally, this:
rm -rf ~/.adobe

4) Then, I did this:
sudo apt-get install flashplugin-installer

Upon doing all of those steps, in that order, I then tested it in
Firefox and SRware Iron per these instructions (after relaunching both
browsers):
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/protected-video-content-play.html#id_79509

The "Getty Train" plays beautifully in both.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1296705

Title:
  Amazon Prime Instant Video Does Not Work

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