The internet offers up an array of tutorials for reenabling protected Flash content on Linux. The bad news if you’re on Ubuntu 13.10 is that most of them no longer apply.
To play DRM content, Adobe Flash requires a package called HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) to be installed. Although HAL has been deprecated on Linux for a good couple of years now (replaced by udev) it remained available for install from the Ubuntu repositories.
Until now, that is.
Ubuntu 13.10 no longer offers HAL in its repositories – a move that makes playing Flash video using DRM a little trickier.
Download & Install HAL – The Easy Way
Ubuntu user Michael Blennerhassett maintains a PPA for Ubuntu 13.10 only that contains the required HAL package, along with a patch from (the always awesome) Arch Linux folks that fixes several issues that result from using the older HAL package in Saucy.
To add the PPA open a new Terminal window and enter the following commands carefully:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mjblenner/ppa-hal
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install hal
Following installation, Amazon Prime, Google Play Movies, 4OD, and a number of other DRM-demanding Flash streaming sites should start to function again.
Having installed from the PPA, we tested Amazon Prime in both Firefox and Chromium using the version of Flash in the Ubuntu repos. We found that Amazon Prime didn’t work with Chrome’s built-in version of ‘Pepper’ Flash.
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