I have been a happy Amazon Prime customer for the last couple of years. One of the biggest perks of using it the availability of large number of videos available for instantly watching. Infact, I watched almost all episodes of Star Trek (TOS to Voyager) using this method.
Sometime in the second or third week of January, this method broke down. Whenever, I tried to play the episodes of Voyager, I got an error in Flash player. Basically, it will open a dialog box saying ‘Updating Player’ which will soon error out saying "an error occurred and your player could not be updated”. If you retry, it will get stuck with ‘Updating Player’ .
I was using Ubuntu 11.10 on a 64 bit machine. I tried lot of things and nothing really worked. I installed and reinstalled Adobe Flash plugin and other codecs and basically made a mess of my system. Finally, I found a simple solution in Amazon Instant Video forum in an unrelated thread. The link is here . The solution is very simple . Install hal and libhal1 package for your distro. If you are using Ubuntu, the command is
sudo apt-get install libhal1 hal
Few of my friends also had this issue and installing these packages seems to fix the issue. Unfortunately, this useful tip seems buried under other noise and hence I decided to put a separate blog post. If this did not fix the issue I recommend looking at Adobe’s Problems playing protected video content on 64-bit Ubuntu Linux page. This has some additional information on making flash work.
I had the exact same problem, and this worked! Thank you!
thanks for the tip, I will try this now and am confident it will work.
Thanks for making the solution and easy one liner for the terminal.
Im using linux mint 12 w Cinnamon desktop (which I really like w Ubuntu too) since Mint is Ubuntu code I executed your suggested command. I’m going to try it now.. You can assume it works, if not I’ll search you out again to let you know… Shaun
thanks so much. The HAL library install found in the adobe link you provided fixed the problem for me in both Amazon Instant Video and Google/You Tube Movies. Thanks so much!
Thank you soooo much!! I depend on amazon videos soo much and am illiterate in ubuntu. you’re solution worked like a charm
Thank for the post but this does not solve my problem. Did you do anything else after installing hal?
Forrest,
I suggest you take a look at http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/929/cpsid_92948.html . Hope it helps.
I love you! THANKS I love the ubuntu and the amazon video
Awesome! Thank you so much!! 🙂
For Fedora 16, retrieving these three packages from PBone.net worked, without restarting Chrome:
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yum localinstall ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-filesystem-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-libs-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm
##########################
works perfectly on fedora 16
corrected an error by adding missing hal-info package
below is what i ran
sudo yum localinstall ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-filesystem-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-libs-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-info-0.5.14-6.fc15.x86_64.rpm ftp://ftp.muug.mb.ca/mirror/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/hal-info-20090716-4.fc15.noarch.rpm
I omitted the necessary clearance of cache contents by:
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rm -rf ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/NativeCache ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/AssetCache ~/.adobe/Flash_Player/APSPrivateData2
##################################
[…] by not having hal and libhal1 installed on Ubuntu. This is backed up by the following links: Fixing ‘Updating player…’ issue in Amazon Instant Video on Linux Problems playing protected video content | Ubuntu Linux, Flash Player 11 Fixing this sounds like […]
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
You rule
[…] If you want to watch Amazon Instant Video, you need to install two obscure packages (hat tip to this blog post): […]
Thank you very much!!
Thanks for the tip. Worked in Debian, too.
awesome, IT WORKED! thanks so much for the tip!
Thanks for the solution Saravanan!
Thanks!
omg ty! You get a cookie! I was killing myself on this one. ❤
Worked perfectly here, also! THanks for making this so easy!
Thanks, easy as pie! After spending some hours trying other (useless) solutions!
[…] Read the full post which has more things to try, if this didn’t fix it for you. BTW: If this did work for you, please let me know in the comments below. […]
Worked perfectly on 12.10 Kubuntu! Thank you!
Thanks a tonn mate.
I just reinstalled the flash player and was about to uninstall and agn reinstall the same thing agn .. saved me a lot of trouble .. :))
Works perfectly on Ubuntu 12.04.
Just saying thanks for the discovery. I really appreciate it. As an Amazon prime subscriber myself, this was getting aggravating – not being able to watch. Thanks again for the simple and effective resolution.
this worked great thanks!
This worked!!! Thank you very much!
Thanks, it worked great!
All set to watch an instant video (worked fine on my MacBook). Ugh, the lights were dimmed & my wife was waiting to see “The Big Lebowski”-no go in Firefox or Chrome. Changed from Mint Flash Player to Adobe Flash Player. Deleted PPapi on Chrome – all to no avail. Then I found your one line install of Hal & Libhal1 & Banda Bing – Instant movies galore!! Thank you, Thank you.
Ps: What the hell is Hal anyway?
Sorry, I forgot to mention that it worked fine on Linux Mint 14.1
Thanks again!
Good job thanks!
worked instantly! thanks 🙂 🙂
Have been watching Amazon Prime videos for over a year on Fedora and CentOS Linux. My wife was very happy watching The Good Wife but all of a sudden on Wednesday April 10th, the player fails to work. yum -y update says everything is up-to-date. http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player.html says i have the latest version of flash for Linux.
Flash = 11.2.202.280
Linux 2.6.32-358.2.1.el6.x86_64 (64-bit)
Worked on Ubuntu 12.04. Wow, thanks so much for posting this!!! I couldn’t find anything from the usual support resources!
This didn’t work for me, Ubuntu 13.04 32-bit with Firefox.
Works on ubuntu0.12.04.3 + Firefox 20.0
Thanks!
Did not work on Mint 15, SAD FACE!!! anyone have a work around for mint?
Just started having this problem and I’ve been going crazy trying to figure out what to do. Your fix worked great! I wish I would have found it sooner. Thanks!
AmAzInG FIX!!!!! Mint is exactly like Ubuntu BTW. Same commands – sudo and apt/synaptic are the primary RPMs.
no workie on Mint 15 64bit 😦
Thanks, man, this worked on Crunchbang
Thank you. It worked on Mint 13 Maya.