Pipelight

Amazon video not working with user agent switch

Asked by dustanl

This is in followup to http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2193974; I'm trying to view amazon videos without having to use virtualbox.

As described in the ubuntu forums post, with no agent switch, I got the error "An error occurred and your player could not be updated. This is likely because your Flash Player or Browser needs to be updated. This update is required to play back this video."

Per your FAQ, I tried both User Agent Overider and UAControl with Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1.

User Agent Overider seemed to have no effect whatsoever; I got the same error from the same attempt to update. I assume I was just supposed to enter the string "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1" into the settings.

Having failed that, I disabled it and tried UAControl, which had the option to choose which websites to link to which agents. So I linked amazon.com to the same agent as above, and attempted to view an amazon video again. This looked more promising; I got some windows style install dialogs (sadly I can't remember exactly what was installed, but it was probably shockwave or silverlight?). Then once that was finished amazon took a while to attempt to load the video, and then gave me "We're experiencing a problem playing this video. If this problem continues, please contact Amazon Customer Service and refer to error 1002."

Any words of wisdom you have to share are appreciated. Thanks!
Dustan Levenstein

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Sebastian Lackner
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Best Sebastian Lackner (slackner) said : 		#1

Hi,

I assume the error occurs since you have both Pipelight and the Linux flash plugin enabled. To solve this problem please try out the following steps:

1) Please use the user agent switcher "User agent overrider" (for Firefox) or the recommended one for Chrom(ium) and setup this UA string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1

2) After that you should check that you've really only Flash enabled (you can probably reenable Silverlight or other plugins later, but for now it makes testing easier, since Amazon Instant supports multiple plugins, and probably selects the wrong one):

sudo pipelight-plugin --list-enabled
pipelight-plugin --list-enabled

And disable all other plugins with: [sudo] pipelight-plugin --disable PLUGIN
Repeat this until only Flash is remaining.

3) Before testing with Amazon you should first ensure that the Flash plugin works as expected (and is really used).

When you're using Chromium just open "about:plugins", click on "Details", and disable all other (Linux) Flash versions.

For Firefox this is a bit more complicated, since Firefox prefers always the Linux flash plugin. The easiest way is to select Pipelight as an alternative for the Flash plugin. How to do this is described here:
http://fds-team.de/cms/pipelight-installation.html#section_2_3

When you've configured everything then check by right-clicking on a video that really the Window Flash plugin is used. You should also see some entries with for example "Pipelight", which makes it easy to distinguish which version is used.

4) After you've everything set up try again with Amazon instant! :)

If this doesn't help I would suggest you to join our IRC channel #pipelight on freenode, for example with this webchat, which allows to help you a bit more interactively. Just stay patient or retry later when noone responds immediately ;-)
http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=%23pipelight

Sebastian

Revision history for this message
dustanl (dlevenstein) said : 		#2

Thanks Sebastian Lackner, that solved my question.

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dustanl (dlevenstein) said : 		#3

Thanks so much!!! It seems I didn't have flash enabled at all, actually. Worked like a charm. :)