The amazon instant video streaming launched their services in germany about one month ago. I don’t have a playstation or a xbox to stream it directly to my tv so i wanted to stream it via my raspberry pi using xbmc. I could not find a plugin so I decided to make one by myself. I started to get the streaming services to work on my arch linux. As all(?!) streaming services, amazon uses the silverlight plugin from microsoft. Because of the DRM encryption is inevitable to install silverlight. In linux you can use piplight which emulates the real silverlight plugin to get it work. Now i thought to simply code an addon to browse nicely in xbmc through the movies then launch url via a browser which have piplight installed and uses a faked user agent and then control the stream via my keyboard, or map the controls via the HDMI-CEC settings. I didn’t have my raspberry pi here so i started with the addon on my computer which basically shows the movies with text and images. To start the browser i wanted to use the ChromeLauncher addon which is outthere.. All was possible until i got my raspberry pi today and i realised that it’s not possible to get pipelight work on it.
As Michael Müller from the pipelight team said:
sorry, but it is not possible to install Pipelight on ARM devices, since we use the original windows version of Silverlight/Flash/… which are only available for x86 processors. The only possibility to run these plugins on ARM devices is to emulate a x86 processor, but this is terrible slow and not suitable for video rendering.
So here you can browse or use my uncompleted plugin code for future projects. I think that the life of silverlight won’t be so long anymore, so maybe i can finish my project later.
[UPDATE]
Amazon allows you now to stream with flash instead of silverlight. So checkout this plugin and have fun: http://www.kodinerds.net/index.php/Thread/43912-RELEASE-Amazon-Prime-Instant-Video-US-UK-DE