Pipelight, Amazon, and a tale of two Flashes

Hi,

I don't know of any way to select a specific plugin version depending on the visited website. This is automatically done by Chrome and is not influenced by Pipelight, so you may find a browser extension which might address this problem, but I am not sure whether this is possible through the APIs offered by Chrome.

Anyway, what do you mean with "New problem: Amazon became the only flash video player that responds to input." ? I am not aware of such a problem in the recent version of Pipelight except in some very rare cases when websites render HTML over Flash. There was indeed such a bug in an older version, so I would recommend you checking whether you are using Pipelight 0.2.3. The version number should show up when you right click on a plugin.

Michael

I was hoping for a recommendation for an extension, since I know Chrome and Pipelight don't do it.

When I go to a site with an embedded video player, such as NBC.com or CBS.com, Pipelight's Windows Flash doesn't respond to any mouse or keyboard input. I cannot pause, seek, adjust volume, or enter fullscreen. It just runs all autoplay scripting. I disabled the Pipelight copy of Flash for now, since I use other Flash players more often than Amazon.

I will check the version number, but I only installed Pipelight and Wine last week, so it ought to be current.

Is there any fix for using Amazon's Silverlight player? If I could use Silverlight there, I may not need to use the Windows version of Flash.

Hi Peter,

if you want that Pipelight is only enabled for specific pages, the easiest way is actually to use a different browser profile directory. This is not a perfect solution, but the probably the easiest one. Just run your browser for example with:
google-chrome --user-data-dir=$HOME/.config/chrome-pipelight
and afterwards enable/disable the plugins you like in both your default profile and this custom profile. You can also create some shortcut or desktop icon which starts up the separate chrome profile a bit more easily.

Nevertheless: The issues you're experiencing are very weird - I did some tests, and was unable to reproduce it. Please check which version of Pipelight and Wine you've installed exactly. For Ubuntu based systems its sufficient to run:

dpkg --list | grep "\(wine-.*-installer\|wine-compholio\|pipelight\)" | sed 's/ \+ /\t/g' | cut -f2-3;

If possible please also provide some (public available) URL for testing, so we can try to confirm the problem.

Sebastian

Fixed! While I was preparing to get version information, I realized that when I disabled Pipelight Flash, I didn't have to re-enable Chrome's native Flash. I did some testing, and discovered that the input glitch was caused by having both Flash versions enabled at the same time. Running it with just Pipelight Flash works fine, though the animation might be a little more jerky.

Okay, this is odd. It's not as fixed as I thought. I'm still running into this problem, and it's varied.

Using Pipelight Flash in Chromium, I started experimenting with Incognito and spoofing a Firefox/Windows user agent. Sometimes changing one or the other worked, sometimes it didn't, and I've done it multiple times over the course of writing this to refresh my memory as to which was which and it seems to be inconsistent. Currently, my best bet seems to be Incognito/Windows UA, but it changes. When I thought this was resolved, I was on the NBC video player, and I would have been in normal (non-Incognito, default UA) mode, but that's not working for me now.

I used these pages for the test:

http://www.nbc.com/community/video/basic-intergluteal-numismatics/n44866/

http://www.cbs.com/shows/big_bang_theory/video/

Pages with JW Player seem to work fine consistently.

Pipelight is version 0.2.3.

Wine is version 1.7.1.

I discovered when trying to get version numbers that sometimes Pipelight's info isn't in the right-click menu. I was hoping I could report that this was consistent with cases where Flash was unresponsive to input, but no such luck. The NBC player I loaded to look for it (Incognito, default UA) was unresponsive and had no Pipelight info, but the CBS player load I got it from (also Incognito/default) was unresponsive and did.

So I have a lot more variables which seem to be relevant, but don't appear to directly affect the issue.

Hi,

Wine 1.7.1 is very outdated (latest one is 1.7.10). I'm not even sure if the problem was fixed in this version already.

Please try to update your packages with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

When you still see the old version you can also try to force the upgrade with:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Please try again after updating.

Sebastian

My Wine installation is the Compholio package, which, according to the website, is still on 1.7.0 (website out of date maybe?)

http://www.compholio.com/wine-compholio/

WineHQ lists 1.6.2 as stable, and 1.7.10 as dev.

Compholio is designed to make some applications (like Pipelight) work without having to install manually, so if I install a newer version of Wine, would the patches and existing installations be likely to follow, or would I have to install the Pipelight plugins again?

Hi Peter,

the version number on this page is outdated, I will point Erich E. Hoover to this when I talk to him tomorrow (he's also part of the Pipelight Team).

New wine-compholio packages are directly available in our PPAs (either ppa:pipelight/stable or ppa:ehoover/compholio ), so basically it should just be sufficient to update your packages (if you have added the PPA).

If you didn't add the PPA with wine-compholio you can also grab newer packages manually by downloading from here:
https://launchpad.net/~pipelight/+archive/stable/+packages

(The manual steps normally aren't necessary when you used these instructions: http://fds-team.de/cms/pipelight-installation.html#section_1_1 )

Sebastian

Updated :)

Wine is updated to the latest Compholio release. Still buggy. I've now found that Amazon Instant Video has a bug where certain episodes (always the same ones, no idea if there's any connection between them) will consistently fail to load unless I'm in private browsing.

Also, when the AIV player is in fullscreen, right-clicking will make it stop responding to clicks (and lose the Pipelight menu entries), but it will exit fullscreen for the Escape key, and then full control is restored.

I'm starting to think my problems are entirely in Flash. If I could just get Amazon's Silverlight player working, I could probably jettison Pipelight's copy of Flash altogether.

A Microsoft forum post suggested that deleting mspr.hds from %programdata%\Microsoft\PlayReady fixes the error 1002 Silverlight gives for Amazon's player. Would that be possible/advisable within Pipelight/Wine?

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/silverlight/en-US/a8c74e71-f9b8-4754-bc99-04812d476e87/major-issue-with-amazoncom-streaming-vs-silverlight?forum=silverlightgen

According to Amazon's help page, that file has to do with DRM, and messing with it may affect other programs, so they advise only renaming it, but I'm guessing it probably gets rewritten when it's needed, since people say it works to delete it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201178020

I haven't had issues with Amazon (they don't provide video service in Canada) but I haven experienced issues with Flash being unresponsive on many sites using the Pipelight plugin, for example, at http://video.citytv.com
The problem seems to show up primarily when using Chromium. I load a video, and I can't play/pause or switch to fullscreen. However if I reload the page the controls will usually start to work. Sometimes I have to reload several times before the controls respond.
I'll try using Firefox the next time I want to watch a show and see if the same problem comes up. I originally went with Chromium since it's easy to tell it to use the pipelight plugin rather than native flash. This lets me use Chromium to watch TV shows that have DRM protections requiring the Windows version of flash, while running the native Linux flash player on Firefox for the rest of my internet needs.

Hi Sean,

the problem you mention is caused by a plugin mode which is not yet supported by Pipelight. Some websites use HTML for the video controls instead of putting them into the Flash file. These controls are hidden behind the Flash application and in the standard NPAPI mode a click or mouse move will not go through the Flash application and therefore the controls will not fade in. The next Pipelight release will include the first required steps to use this mode, but it must be enabled manually and moreover the performance is worse than in standard mode and the keyboard input doesn't work yet. Just take a look at this bug report: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/pipelight/+bug/1254268 for further news.

Michael

Hi Michael,
Thanks for the quick and informative response. (And for the work on this plugin - so far, so good!) I'll take a look at the bug report. Until the next release, needing to hit the reload button now and then is still preferable to needing to boot a different OS to watch a video!