Ubuntu
hal package

HAL support in Saucy?

Asked by Peter Lemieux on 2013-10-19

I notice that HAL is not available in 13.10 Saucy. Will this be released at some future date?

I realize that HAL is deprecated, but it is required if one wants to watch material from Amazon Instant Video. Without the hal and libhal1 packages, the Amazon player complains that the installed version of Flash Player is out of date. However once I installed those two packages in versions from 12.04 through 13.04, the videos played correctly. This is the solution that Amazon support recommends for Linux users.

I would prefer not to try and compile this from source if a package will be released in the coming weeks.

Question information

Language:: English Edit question

Status:: Solved

For:: Ubuntu hal Edit question

Assignee:: No assignee Edit question

Solved by:: Peter Lemieux

Solved:: 2014-01-05

Last query:: 2014-01-05

Last reply:: 2013-10-21

Link existing bug

Revision history for this message

actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said on 2013-10-19:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Halsectomy

HAL has been out of Linux for a long time now.

Have you tried other web browsers to see if the same issue occurs? Have you reported a bug?

Revision history for this message

Peter Lemieux (seijisensei) said on 2013-10-19:

It doesn't work in Chromium or Firefox. I tried installing Chrome, but it is missing a dependency. I tried installing Chrome, but it has dependency problems even after installing libudev0 as suggested in http://www.omgchrome.com/install-google-chrome-in-ubuntu-13-10/.

"This isn't a bug, it's a feature." Installing hal and libhal1 is the only way I know of to enable Amazon Instant Video on Linux. As I said, it has to do with the methods they use to handle DRM. Maybe they will come up with another method in the future, but for the time being it is what it is.

It should be no surprise to learn that a service which targets Windows and Mac users, and which distributes DRM-encumbered videos, does not have good support for Linux. Using HAL is the one workaround that was available.

There are persistent discussions about this issue on Amazon's forums. A good example is http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon%20video%20on%20demand/ref=cm_cd_fp_ef_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx3EQAX98ED5WQ3&cdThread=Tx167YET6CH0PQI.