Yesterday we were happily watching an episode of 24 via Amazon Prime Instant video on our media PC which runs Ubuntu 11.10 (specifically, Mythbuntu). Today when we tried to start an episode, inside of the Adobe Flash Window an "Updating..." appears in a yellow status bar... and then fails. This was particularly mysterious because I already was running the latest version of Flash!
The problem is that starting end of January 2012, Amazon has slowly been re-encoding their video content so a new DRM enabled Flash is required. This DRM support in Flash on Linux requires Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) software (sigh...). So to get things working again, be sure i) have the latest version of Flash for Linux installed, aka version 11.x +, and ii) install the HAL libraries. At least on Ubuntu/Mythbuntu, HAL is not installed by default. So to fix my Linux box to play all Amazon video again, I just closed all Firefox/Flash instances and then entered:
This Adobe post got me on the right track, although initially I ignored it because it claimed to be specific to 64bit Linux (and I am running 32bit), but obviously the tidbit about HAL is important for either 32 or 64bit users. Another blogger talks about additional challenges for 64bit users here.sudo apt-get install hal
Hope this helps someone.
