Member Avatar for radenli

Does anyone know how to watch Amazon Instant Video on Ubuntu 14.04?
I have googled this, but the solutions may only work on older verion of Ubuntu or Flash player. Doesn't work on 14.04.
Any suggestion?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by rubberman

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Short primer and why older guides failed: the playback problem is not Ubuntu itself but DRM and which player the site serves. As suggested, Amazon historically used Silverlight/Flash and server-side checks that prevented a native Linux browser from receiving the Silverlight stream; people patched around that with tools like Pipelight. Modern streaming moved to HTML5 + EME (Widevine) so current browsers on Linux can play protected streams when a CDM is available. How‑To Geek: Amazon Instant Video on Linux and the Widevine overview explain the change in approach. (howtogeek.com)

Practical, current approach (fastest, least fragile): install official Google Chrome on Ubuntu — Chrome ships the Widevine CDM that many providers (including Amazon Prime Video partners) use for HTML5/EME playback. If you prefer Firefox, enable “Play DRM‑controlled content” in Settings so Firefox will download Widevine for you. Avoid plain Chromium builds on older systems because Widevine support has historically been missing or difficult to enable. Links: Download Chrome and Firefox DRM support. (google.com)

Notes specific to Ubuntu 14.04: 14.04 reached end-of-life and no longer receives standard updates, which makes the browser/CDM route harder to maintain — upgrading to a supported release is strongly recommended. If upgrading is impossible, Pipelight was the common fallback in 2014–2016 to run Silverlight under Wine, but it’s brittle and now largely obsolete compared with using a modern browser + Widevine. See Ubuntu EOL notes and historical Pipelight coverage for context. ()

If browser approaches still fail, the most reliable workaround is a Windows guest (as describes): create a Windows VM (VirtualBox or similar), install a supported browser there, and play Prime Video in the guest. That adds overhead but removes Linux/DRM incompatibility as a variable. See the VirtualBox manual for guest setup details. (virtualbox.org)

Summary checklist: upgrade Ubuntu if possible; install official Chrome (or enable DRM in Firefox); confirm Widevine is present; avoid user‑agent tricks or old NPAPI solutions unless you accept their fragility; use a Windows VM as last resort.

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Member Avatar for rubberman

My guess would be that the Amazon DRM (Digital Rights Management software) is not supported by Ubuntu 14.04 or your version of Flash.

Member Avatar for Don Graham

I spent months trying to answer you question. I live in Thailand so I need to use a VPN tunnel.I tryed to install HideMyAss VPN and even had them do a remote in-stall. No luck. Than I tryed to install Strong VPN,no luck. I tryed to install openVPN. No luck with that eather. So I installed Vbox and booted a live windows 7 disk. I installed HMA and Strong VPN. Now I can watch my Amazon movies.

Edited by Don Graham
Member Avatar for rubberman

Unfortunately, Don Graham is pretty much correct. Many DRM (Digital Restrictions Management according to the FSF) versions are not supported in Linux, depending upon version, so you need to run an MS operating system in a virtual machine in order to get your paid for audio/video streams. This is a very sucky situation, and shows why we need to keep pushing back against DRM encumbered streams and data. MS licenses the DRM keys and such (not cheap) so you can use their OS for this stuff. That's why you can play commercial BluRay discs on Windoze, but not on Linux directly.

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