Watching Amazon Prime Instant Video in Firefox on Ubuntu

Since a few days, Amazon's video streaming service is available in Germany. If you're on Linux, you'll be greeted with an error message and will be unable to view videos in your browser, though. This is because Amazon uses Microsoft's Silverlight to deliver the videos. Fortunately for us, there's Pipelight, a one-stop solution for running the Silverlight plugin in Wine and piping the streamed video back to a native browser.

Since the installation, while rather easy, consists of several steps, I'll detail the installation process here.

Installing Pipelight

Add the Pipelight PPA to your sources, update your package list and install pipelight. This is straight from the Pipelight readme.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pipelight/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --install-recommends pipelight-multi

Then, get the latest Silverlight plugin and activate it. You will probably be prompted about some licences, press Y to accept them.

sudo pipelight-plugin --update
sudo pipelight-plugin --enable silverlight

While now you've got a working Silverlight plugin, Amazon will still refuse to stream to your browser. That's because your browser's user agent betrays the fact you're running Linux.

Installing a user agent switching addon

Thus, we need an addon to fix that. I use UAControl, since it allows for site-based switching. Unfortunately, it can't change the response of Javascript's navigator.UserAgent call. User-Agent JS Fixer takes care of that for us.

Install those two addons, then open UAControl's preferences and add Firefox 15/Windows: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20120427 Firefox/15.0a1 as your new user agent for amazon.de. Save that and you're done. Enjoy streaming!