Problem with HAL / UDEV and Amazon Instant Video (Adobe Flash)

[lub997]

I am having an issue watching Amazon Instant Videos, which use Adobe Flash. About 25% of the videos that I attempt to watch work perfectly fine, but the other 75% display a message and a progress bar on the screen saying "Updating Player..." The flash player is always unable to update, however, and I always get the following message:

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.

Click here to learn more about updating your player.

Clicking the link provides nothing at all useful. So, I did some research, and found nothing at all specific to openSUSE, but found that this error is caused 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 it should be very straight forward, and as simple as installing the HAL (Linux Hardware Abstraction Layer) package, but openSUSE no longer uses HAL, so it cannot be installed. openSUSE has switched from using HAL to using UDEV instead. I checked, and I already have UDEV installed, yet am still getting the "Updating Player..." error. Does anyone know how to solve this?

[nrickert]

There is another recent thread about this:
Flash Player requires HAL for DRM content

It might be worth reading that thread.

[martin_helm]

Install from here
http://software.opensuse.org/package/hal

[lub997]

Thanks to both of you for your responses. I installed the 1 Click installer for HAL from KDE from the link that Martin posted:

software.opensuse.org:

It did not appear to have any issues installing properly, and seemed to go quite smoothly. Installing HAL helped somewhat. I no longer get the "Updating Player..." error. Now Adobe Flash tries to play the video within the web browser just as it normally does with the videos that do play correctly. However, now I am getting a new error. Now it says:

The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed.
Send crash report

All of the videos that used to play correctly still do, but the ones that wouldn't play before now show this error instead of the old error. Any ideas?

[deano_ferrari]

All of the videos that used to play correctly still do, but the ones that wouldn't play before now show this error instead of the old error. Any ideas?

I don't like your chances here. Sending the carsh report is obviously a waste of time, since Adobe are no longer developing/supporting the plugin, and unfortunately it contains proprietary code. Flash is EOL.

http://forums.opensuse.org/english/o...oid-4-1-a.html

My suggestion is to lobby/encourage the relevant site people to migrate to an alternative content delivery system, compatible with Linux, (and maybe Android too).

[martin_helm]

Go into yast -> system -> system services (runlevel) and search in the
list if haldaemon is activated, if not activate it.


--
PC: oS 12.1 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.8.4 | GeForce GT 420
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.1 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.8.4 | HD 3000
eCAFE 800: oS 12.1 i586 | AMD Geode LX 800@500MHz | 512MB | KDE 3.5.10

[lub997]

Martin, your instructions fixed the issue immediately. Videos that would not play before are playing perfectly now. Thank you very much for your help! Problem solved.

deano_ferrari, thank you for your information about the discontinuation of support for Flash. I heard nothing about it's support being discontinued by Adobe until you mentioned it, and then I read something on wired.com about it today. Good to know. I wonder what content providers will be replacing it with. I have played around with HTML5 video, and it seems to work quite nicely, but supporting the various different browsers seems like quite a chore, as far picking a video encoding compatible with all browsers and operating systems and even coding the HTML itself for all browsers to recognize the videos. I think that's more a flaw with the way that certain browsers are implemented, though, than a flaw with HTML5. Now that Internet Explorer is finally significantly losing market share to Firefox and Chrome, I think this is a problem that will likely take care of itself in time. I think the new HTML video feature is pretty neat.

[Marikafaye]

Any chance you can tell me - a NOOB to ubuntu - how to do this ? I have this issue and am self learning - Please help ?

Thank you in advance!

Go into yast -> system -> system services (runlevel) and search in the
list if haldaemon is activated, if not activate it.


--
PC: oS 12.1 x86_64 | i7-2600@3.40GHz | 16GB | KDE 4.8.4 | GeForce GT 420
ThinkPad E320: oS 12.1 x86_64 | i3@2.30GHz | 8GB | KDE 4.8.4 | HD 3000
eCAFE 800: oS 12.1 i586 | AMD Geode LX 800@500MHz | 512MB | KDE 3.5.10

[Nikos78]

a NOOB to ubuntu

Well, supposing you are using UBUNTU, you don't have yast. So, you probably should ask on the Ubuntu forums....

[tom_of_helatrobus]

Go into yast -> system -> system services (runlevel) and search in the
list if haldaemon is activated, if not activate it.

Have downloaded and installed software.opensuse.org:. Also gone into yast to activate haldaemon. But still getting the message, "The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed.
Send crash report."