[SOLVED] Precise, Flashplayer and Amazon Instant Movies

[GreyGeek]

Last night I decided to revisit Amazon Instant Movies. I purchased PRIME membership when it first came out several years ago and a lot of movies have been free to me. I've watched about an equal mix of free and paid for movies.

I saw a free movie from "Amazon Studios" and decided to see what their first effort was like. When I clicked the play button a progress bar displayed on the screen, along with the message "updating Player", and after the orange bar got to the end this dialog popped up:


That wasn't good.

A little Google research determined that the problem first appeared around Jan 15th, about 6 weeks ago.
http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon v...TxFTGOK5LRL3JM

Some think that flash-player is now dependent on HAL, but Precise has HAL already installed. Some thought that the latest flash-player for Linux was required. I had already upgraded to it, and when I went to the Adobe website to check, it informed me that I already had the latest plug-in installed:
Download Adobe Flash Player

Adobe Flash Player version 11.1.102.62
Your system: Linux 64-bit, Firefox | 3.83 MB


Amazon still doesn't think so.

I installed the Chromium web browser (because Amazon said it was, besides FireFox, an acceptable browser) but Chromium didn't make Amazon happy either.

Notice that through out all of this, checking to make sure, Amazon is still willing to accept my credit card to purchase stuff, and I understand that they use tens of thousands of Linux servers in order to have fast, stable and secure websites. So, it is not like they aren't technically knowledgeable about Linux.

Some people reported that their older versions of Linux ran OK. I fired up the old Sony, which was running a fully updated Kubuntu Lucid. The movie began playing AND THEN was interrupted when the "update player" message appeared!!! Lucid failed the update. The movie wouldn't resume or restart. By now I wasn't surprised. This confirms for me the suggestions of others that this is a DRM problem, not a Linux problem.

Over the years I've done several thousand dollars business with Amazon. Over $600 in this month alone. Money talks. It also walks. I have on occasions watched movies at YouTube. I checked on YouTube and the adobe player worked fine there. I am going to remove the Adobe flash-player and install LightSpark. IF it works on YouTube I will keep it. When LightSpark works on Amazon Instant Movies I will consider resuming our relationship.

EDIT: I removed completely removed flashplayer and installed LightSpark. It works on ordinary videos, but at YouTube if the video contains an ad skip marker, or intermediate ad marks, LightSpark hangs. Worse, it locks up your entire system, except your mouse, but including your keyboard. Ctl+Alt+BkSP doesn't kill the x-server. The only choice is a power cycle.

So, I reluctantly reinstall Flashplayer. I just thought about Viemo, which works very well, but is not widely used.

EDIT:EDIT:
I reluctantly decided to test HAL and installed it. I am concerned that since HAL had been replaced by Upstart a couple releases ago, I didn't know how it would affect Upstart and what is a very good installation of Precise.

I installed HAL and its half-dozen auxillary apps, and rebooted. The reboot seem to be the same. I checked to see if hald (the HAL daemon) was running. It was. I tested the "Sky Pirates" movie, or actually storyboard, at Amazon and it loaded the player update and proceeded to play the movie.

Now, I'll see what affect having HAL installled will have on the operation of Precise.

[rms]

Have you tried with Chrome from Google's site? It looks like it would load the video but since I'm not in US I cannot confirm if there are any further issues.

[GreyGeek]

Have you tried with Chrome from Google's site? It looks like it would load the video but since I'm not in US I cannot confirm if there are any further issues.

As I wrote in my first post:

I installed the Chromium web browser (because Amazon said it was, besides FireFox, an acceptable browser) but Chromium didn't make Amazon happy either.

Chrome isn't in the repository, and if Chromium won't work I doubt that Chrome would either.

[rms]

As I wrote in my first post:

Chrome isn't in the repository, and if Chromium won't work I doubt that Chrome would either.

My bad, I haven't checked the repos first. I thought it was an older version. Well, if it is a DRM problem, than who can watch videos there? Lame.

[rms]

I tested the "Sky Pirates" movie, or actually storyboard, at Amazon and it loaded the player update and proceeded to play the movie.

Out of curiosity, to which version was the player updated?

[GreyGeek]

Out of curiosity, to which version was the player updated?

As shown below, I already had the latest version, which was already installed in a prior update. It seems that the "DRM" involved was merely forcing you to watch the ads preceding a video, or appearing somewhere in the middle. My old Sony laptop running Lucid also had that version and, as I pointed out, the movie actually started playing before it was interrupted and then blocked. So, flashplayer COULD play the video IF the DRM didn't block it. LightSpark did not have a way to react to the DRM query so it hung, waiting for input from someone or something, and had modal control of all the mouse and keyboard input functions.

$ apt-cache showpkg adobe-flashplugin
Package: adobe-flashplugin
Versions:
11.1.102.62-0precise1 (/var/lib/apt/lists/archive.canonical.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_partner _binary-amd64_Packages) (/var/lib/dpkg/status)
Description Language:
File: /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.canonical.com_ubuntu_dists_precise_partner _binary-amd64_Packages
MD5: e2507df43a417e08d1138f86335ee07f


Reverse Depends:
adobe-flashplugin:i386,adobe-flashplugin
adobe-flash-properties-kde,adobe-flashplugin 11.1.102.62-0precise1
adobe-flash-properties-gtk,adobe-flashplugin 11.1.102.62-0precise1
mythnetvision,adobe-flashplugin
Dependencies:
11.1.102.62-0precise1 - wget (0 (null)) fontconfig (0 (null)) libatk1.0-0 (2 1.12.4) libc6 (2 2.4) libcairo2 (2 1.2.4) libfontconfig1 (2 2.8.0) libfreetype6 (2 2.2.1) libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 (2 2.22.0) libglib2.0-0 (2 2.12.0) libgtk2.0-0 (2 2.24.0) libpango1.0-0 (2 1.14.0) libx11-6 (0 (null)) libxext6 (0 (null)) libxt6 (0 (null)) firefox (0 (null)) konqueror-nsplugins (0 (null)) x-ttcidfont-conf (0 (null)) msttcorefonts (0 (null)) ttf-bitstream-vera (16 (null)) ttf-dejavu (0 (null)) ttf-xfree86-nonfree (0 (null)) xfs (2 1:1.0.1-5) libnspr4-0d (0 (null)) libnss3-1d (0 (null)) adobe-flash-properties-gtk (21 11.1.102.62-0precise1) adobe-flash-properties-kde (5 11.1.102.62-0precise1) flashplayer-mozilla (0 (null)) flashplayer-mozilla:i386 (0 (null)) flashplugin (3 6) flashplugin:i386 (3 6) flashplugin-downloader (0 (null)) flashplugin-downloader:i386 (0 (null)) flashplugin-installer (0 (null)) flashplugin-installer:i386 (0 (null)) xfs (3 1:1.0.1-5) xfs:i386 (3 1:1.0.1-5) flashplugin (3 6) flashplugin:i386 (3 6) adobe-flashplugin:i386 (0 (null))
Provides:
11.1.102.62-0precise1 - flashplugin-nonfree
Reverse Provides:
jerry@jerry-Aspire-7739:~$

So far, knocking on my skull, having HAL active doesn't appear to have created a conflict with udev. In fact, I just checked with ksystem and noticed that the hald daemon is not running. I am going to pause for a second to run a DRM video and see if hald gets automatically loaded ....... it does, along with the half dozen other HAL libraries. All running as root! That, IMO, makes the DRM on flashplayer an extreme security risk if run on sites that are notorius for harboring malware (i.e., pron sites).

[rms]

Thanks GG, +1

[SteveRiley]

Have you tried with Chrome from Google's site? It looks like it would load the video but since I'm not in US I cannot confirm if there are any further issues.

Chrome isn't in the repository, and if Chromium won't work I doubt that Chrome would either.

One of the aspects that differentiates Chrome from Chromium is that the former includes a bundled Flash player binary.

As shown below, I already had the latest version, which was already installed in a prior update... it does, along with the half dozen other HAL libraries.

Try this: remove HAL and install the Flash 11.2 release candidate over your existing Flash. It lacks an installer, so you'll have to extract and copy the files by hand. Unfortunately, Adobe's 64-bit packaging puts one of the files in /usr/lib64 rather than /usr/lib, so the hand install is a bit different than what they document in the readme.

First, find out where the current Flash binary lives:

sudo find / -type f -iname libflashplayer.so

After you download the file:

mkdir flash.d
tar -zxfv flashplayer11-2_p6_install_lin_64_022712.tar.gz -C flash.d
sudo cp -v flash.d/usr/bin/* /usr/bin
sudo cp -v flash.d/usr/lib64/kde4/* /usr/lib/kde4
sudo cp -rv flash.d/usr/share/* /usr/share
sudo cp -v flash.d/libflashplayer.so [i]location-of-older-libflashplayer.so[/i]
rm -rv flash.d

One other benefit from this: the RC appears to work much better with Rekonq. No more random browser crashes.

Edited to add: If you're running KDE installed from the repositories rather than the actual Kubuntu distro, you'll probably need to:

sudo apt-get install libkutils4

Although it's labeled a dummy package, the System Settings control module for Flash depends on a file that's inside this package. Without it, the module won't load.

[GreyGeek]

:eek::eek::eek:

Just WOW!

Are you sure you've been using Linux for only a couple years?

[GreyGeek]

Steve, I tried your suggestions. The results were mixed.

The videos at YouTube which began with ads played the ads and continued on to play the videos. LightSpark hung when attempting to play YouTube movies with ads preceeding them.

The movies at Instant Amazon would NOT play. The "updating player..." message appeared and when it was finished it threw the error dialogs. I will have to re-install hal and see if that fixes Amazon.

EDIT: I re-installed HAL and went to Amazon movies and tried again to play the movie. The movie played. So, it pretty much doesn't matter which of the latest 64bit versions of flashplayer are installed... HAL MUST be installed to satisfy the DRM at Amazon Videos.

Without HAL running kfilebox installs during boot without problem. With it, kfilebox crashes and the app has to be restarted. I intially thought that kfilebox crashed because it attempted to install before the Internet was up, but my assumption was wrong. Other than that, so far, HAL doesn't seem to be inteferring with udev in app or device control.

[SteveRiley]

Are you sure you've been using Linux for only a couple years?

<blush>

The movies at Instant Amazon would NOT play. The "updating player..." message appeared and when it was finished it threw the error dialogs. I will have to re-install hal and see if that fixes Amazon... EDIT: I re-installed HAL and went to Amazon movies and tried again to play the movie. The movie played. So, it pretty much doesn't matter which of the latest 64bit versions of flashplayer are installed... HAL MUST be installed to satisfy the DRM at Amazon Videos.

That is truly weird. Remember that Flash actually defines a streaming container, which can contain audio and video formats of many types. To render a Flash container, you need a separate piece of code called a player. The browser runs the player, which opens the container, and then reads and processes the streams within.

My suspicion is that, for movies distributed from Amazon, they've instructed the player to examine a computer's hardware (*). This is probably a little-known feature of Adobe's Flash player which Amazon is using. This feature apparently relies on HAL to perform this hardware analysis, and when HAL is missing, the feature fails.

(*) Conjecture: to determine the uniqueness of a machine, perhaps as a way to detect unauthorized copying?

[GreyGeek]

You're over my head there, but it "reads" reasonably enough.
It seems to me they could have required udev, or read the BIOS directly?

[SteveRiley]

It seems to me they could have required udev, or read the BIOS directly?

Organizations that cling to ancient and aging file formats (FLV, *ahem*) can't be expected to remain current, right?

[rms]

EDIT: I re-installed HAL and went to Amazon movies and tried again to play the movie. The movie played. So, it pretty much doesn't matter which of the latest 64bit versions of flashplayer are installed... HAL MUST be installed to satisfy the DRM at Amazon Videos.

How about making this a sticky? For the benefit of folks who decide to subscribe to Amazon?

[SteveRiley]

Sticky: done.