Amazon Prime Instant Video Does Not Work

Here is a screen shot of the actual error. I didn't take the screen shot, but re-purposed it from here:
http://radio.mcdougallshome.net/software/amazon-instant-video-and-flash-update-fix/

That site uses the 12.04 instructions for working around the problem.

This may be helpful for figuring out the root cause of the issue. It's taken from my link #2 in this bug report. It is a way to test flash with this particular type of protected content. You can click a box on this page to open debugging information on the right-hand side of the screen, which I thought would be useful to someone who had the necessary knowledge of video encoding/flash/whatever to know what this debugging info meant and what to do about it:

test via:
http://drmtest2.adobe.com:8080/SVP/SampleVideoPlayer_FP.html

paste in this video url:
http://drmtest2.adobe.com:8080/Content/anonymous.f4v

When the test video of the train going through the tree-lined countryside works, then Amazon Instant movies work.

I have verified this issue on 3 systems. 2 32-bit systems, and one 64-bit system (where I reported this error from). One 32-bit system is a Lenovo laptop, I think with an ATI video card, the other two are desktops with nVidia cards. I can't remember now which version of hal I installed on the 64-bit system. Sorry.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I seem to have gotten this working in 14.04

I followed the standard workarounds from http://askubuntu.com/questions/362259/how-to-watch-videos-in-amazon-prime-instant-video

Then I noticed that apparmor was DENYING firefox some access. From syslog:

Jun 3 22:54:17 xxxxx kernel: [194199.783739] type=1400 audit(1401850457.516:7270): apparmor="DENIED" operation="file_mmap" profile="/usr/lib/firefox/firefox{,*[^s][^h]}" name="/home/xxxx/.adobe/Flash_Player/NativeCache/xxxxxx/xxxxx/libadobecp-301806-1.so" pid=9145 comm="plugin-containe" requested_mask="m" denied_mask="m" fsuid=1000 ouid=1000

So I added the following to my /etc/apparmor.d/local/usr.bin.firefox

@{HOME}/.adobe/** lrwkm,

And it started working. Looks like the 14.04 firefox apparmor profile disrupts Flash DRM.

Thanks T_W for that helpful observation. I am now able to watching Amazon Instant on Ubuntu (though not through Chrome as I used to). Hopefully the AppArmor settings can be updated.

Your welcome. It looks like the Firefox apparmor profile is provided by the firefox package. Can anyone advise on launchpad etiquette; should this bug be tagged against the firefox package? Or should I enter a new bug against firefox for the apparmor profile problem?

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...

After hours and hours of searching, I just found the EASIEST solution to get PRIME to work with 14.04. First, forget about the AMAZON icon. Go to "Ubuntu Software Center". Click the option, "Allows usage of Silverlight through WINE" Restart browser. Presto done. I am viewing in Firefox. I have not yet tested in other browsers.