[RELEASE] Amazon Prime Instant Video plug-in addon

Hi bluecop. If it's useful to you or someone, I had eden crash once while playing amazon prime video:
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/12952

This is what I sent amazon:

I am writing you about the DRM you have been adding to your amazon prime library.
I know I am not using a supported way to play your videos and do not need you to tell me what the supported ways are since I am aware of them.

I am contacting you in the hope that you will forward this request to someone in charge of decisions for which formats you stream your videos in and whether or not DRM will get applied to cripple your entire collection, making it useless to me and others who do not use flash to play the videos.

I use XBMC on my HTPC since I like the freedom of controlling my own experience and the flexibility of programming it and having it do just what I need on the hardware that makes sense to me (which includes playback on devices that do not have flash capability).
I'm sure you are already aware of this project:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=108124&page=41

For comparison, all HTPC players I've seen that use flash offer a pretty bad experience. Since flash was never designed for proper integration on computers controlled by a simple remote.

You also know that flash is a soon to be dead technology, it's already abandoned by Appple, and even Adobe gave up on it, mostly killing its future.
By converting your content to DRM, you are putting your content out of reach for us, just to appease some of your content providers with their pretend world that somehow it is protecting their content.

Since you are big, and they should listen to you, not the other way around, please convey to them that:
- forcing the use of flash DRM in no way prevents ripping the content with a screen grabber. It's not even hard.
- someone motivated in stealing your content can just reverse engineer that DRM, and in the meantime it only penalizes your customers.
- your streaming content is somewhat low quality, it's much easier to rip from a DVD or a blueray, both of them have been broken. Even HDCP has been broken so content can be ripped in highest quality from HDMI.

Therefore adding DRM to your flash streams just penalizes your legal paying customers, and accomplishes nothing. Please resist further converting your library to DRM, and if at all possible, please revert this useless conversion.

Not doing so, will just force some of your customers to switch to other options, maybe youtube or other, where the content isn't protected from being seen by its paying customers.
I'm not going to tell you that losing us as customers will impact your bottom line in a way that will be significant right now, but I am hoping that you'll consider doing the right thing, in a way that is indeed likely to impact your business longer term.
You are way behind netflix, you need to differentiate yourself in any way possible, and providing easy to watch content for all your customers is definitely a way to do it.

Thank you for reading.

(2012-04-10 02:14)Clutchless Wrote:  It appears that the view settings aren't sticking for Favorited shows as well as when you go into the episode level when browsing shows. It keeps defaulting back to DVD Case/Landscape respectively.
Is anyone else experiencing?

Set up your settings to fix this in the add-on settings

I sent Amazon a similar letter. I'm allowing my Amazon Prime membership to lapse this year.

Bottom line: they are preventing me from watching content I've subscribed to.

I'm sure it wasn't due to my letter but Amazon content is playing again! No more DRM on any of the vids. Please reply with vids that you aren't able to view.

Very nice! I won't get too excited as I think they have temporarily dropped the DRM in the recent past, but I have verified that a few videos that I have tried in the past that had DRM, no longer do. This would be great news if it stayed this way.

I was able to continue using some of the Amazon Prime TV Shows over the past month, while most of the purchased content seemed to have the DRM issue. I noticed the purchased shows seem to work as of last night.

I wonder if this isn't really an Amazon issue - does either XBMC, Flash, or the Amazon Plug-In utilitze some sort of cache, cookie, or token that may expire periodically, which is causing the DRM message to popup? Pure speculation, but I thought I would pose the question anyway...

EDIT: Still just spitballing here, but I came across the following flash page which describes how to reset the DRM vouchers
http://www.iheartair.com/2010/12/22/adob...-vouchers/

Resetting Local Vouchers in Flash Player applications (Flash Player Settings Manager):
When working with Flash Access 2 and Flash Player versions 10.1 and above, the way to reset locally cached DRM vouchers is to go to the Flash Player Global Settings Manager.

Warning: Before running through this step please realize that unlike AIR reset processes which works per-application, resetting the local vouchers for Flash Player applications will reset ALL the vouchers for all the Flash Applications on your system.

I noticed everything is working today. No changes or updates on my end...just no more DRM errors. Nice!

Every thing has been working for me too.

I Sent a message to customer service at amazon asking to make an addon for XBMC after I got my first adobe drm error. This addon is awesome but an official addon would be nice because they probably would not do something that kills it's functionality.

Thanks for your hard work Bluecop and everyone else who has contributed.

Works great on my two pc's that are running it, but not working on my ATV2. Just curious if anyone has it working on an ATV2 on Eden final.
As always, thanks to Bluecop and anyone else that contributes.