Legal and security:
- Disclaimer message within the Addons
- Code licences
- Can I trust this addon with the Amazon credentials?
- Disabling SSL certificate validation
Subtitles:
Video playback:
- HD/4k
- My video is choppy
- My video stutters a lot
- My video is buffering a lot
- My video takes a long time to start playback and interrupts every few seconds
- Why video playback doesn’t work?
- Widevine library’s ok but videos still don’t play
Amazon addon features:
Log and cache file locations:
The disclaimer “Some parts of this addon may not be legal in your country of residence – please check with your local laws before installing” is just that: a simple disclaimer. The authors and contributors of the provided addons take no stance nor responsability over their legality in your country of residence.
The license for each of the addon can be found described inside their respective addon.xml. Currently, both Amazon and Amazon VOD are licensed under a GPL2, while the main repository is not open source.
The safety of the Amazon and Amazon VOD addons are comparable to that of a browser on an uncompromised machine. Unless you specifically choose to store your credentials (disabled by default), once logged in they’re forgotten and only the session cookies are stored, just like any browser. If your machine is compromised, then the addon is just as vulnerable as any other software running.
If you want to check for yourself, the credentials management is done within the LogIn function inside login.py (Amazon VOD).
No. Just don’t. Disabling SSL certificate validation is a terrible and potentially disastrous security vulnerability. It is only present in the addon to help developers analyze the traffic generated and received by the addon itself. In fact, if you find various warnings and messages in Kodi logs about disabled certificate validations, find the addon culprit of this and remove it from your system altogether, if the certificate validation can't be re-enabled.
For visual reference, make sure that inside Amazon VOD the option is always turned off:
Finding the appropriate settings combination between Kodi and the Amazon VOD addon, is quite an art style of its own. First of all, there are two main types of subtitles, full/regular and forced narrative: the regular are your typical subtitles for the entire duration of the video; the forced narrative are subtitles that pop up where needed, for example to provide translations when the spoken language changes within the video (as in the Mr. Robot series). Here’s a screen for the options taken from Kodi Settings > Player > Language > Subtitles:
Inside Kodi you will most likely want to either select your language or the Forced only option.
4K/HD playback is only possible with a Widevine L1 secured device (mostly Android, e.g. Shield, MiBox), all other devices are limited to SD resolution. For 4K playback as well as for the Android data source, the device has to be registered once at Amazon. For this, the login has to be performed again.
On Android you can enable the use android app for 4K videos at settings. This starts the video in the official prime video app and works only for videos with "UHD", "Ultra HD" or "4K" in the video title.
Some of the processors in RPis and similar are sometimes too weak to both decrypt the DRM encryption and decode the video. Reducing the maximum resolution decoded by IS.A, or setting a maximum bandwidth, can help reduce the problem significantly. You can test the various resolutions/bandwidths by selecting manual stream selection for IS.A, and this will allow you to manually select the video and audio tracks you want to reproduce from inside the video playback. You can find all these options in the InputStream Adaptive general settings:
My video is buffering a lot / My video takes a long time to start playback and interrupts every few seconds
Amazon provides content from a wide variety of CDNs across the world, so some of them might work perfectly for you while other may just not. The addons select the first available and active CDN from the round-robin list provided by Amazon. We have, however, a manual method for the user to select their preferred CDN:
First of all: do you have Kodi 18? If so, check your log files. Do you see the following lines?
ERROR: AddOnLog: Adaptive InputStream: Unable to find license; hdcpEnforcementResolutionPixels in JSON string
ERROR: AddOnLog: Adaptive InputStream: License update not successful (no keys)
This is a common problem on many installations, and happens every time something changes in the DRMs/Widevine libraries. The Amazon addons now include Inputstream Helper which should fix the problem for you, but this is not always the case (OpenElec/OSMC are a few examples). You can generally find more information in the main README.
There have been a number of issues around Amazon and geo-provided content. A few questions you have to ask yourself to solve the problem quickly are:
- Is my Kodi box behind a proxy (explicit or transparent)?
- Is there a VPN inside my network?
- Is Kodi using that VPN?
- Am I sure Kodi is not using that VPN?
- Am I really, really sure Kodi is not using that VPN?
90% of connection issues in the past have been about Kodi using network paths it shouldn’t have used, proxy/firewall blocking, DNS lookup errors, SSL spoofing or similar issues. If there’s a mention of connection issues in the logs, you should deeply investigate your network first and foremost.
A cache is created in the web data source for menus and video info. While the menu cache is updated at regular intervals, this does not happen for the video info cache.
If a season is missing episodes, the cache can be refreshed via the context menu in the season overview using the "Refresh" entry.
PrimeVideo support for Amazon VOD has started late after the initial development of the addon. This has resulted in a smaller set of features when using primevideo.com compared to other amazon.TLDs. Features such as video catalog export, adding and removing items from the watchlist, are still unsupported.
Debug logging provide additional information that help developers pinpoint the problem. It is a global setting that can be toggled within Kodi, from System settings > Logging > Debug:
Depending on the OS you’re currently using, you can find the appropriate logs here: Log file location
The addons cache/settings files can be found here: Kodi userdata folder/addon_data/<Addon_ID>
Additional log files (JSON/Raw HTML output/Login) are located below the cache/settings folder in the log folder
For example, Amazon VOD cache files for PrimeVideo (PVCatalog<MarkedID>.pvcp and PVVideoData<MarketID>.pvdp) can be found inside ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.video.amazon-test/, or the relative path appropriate to your OS.