Amazon, HBO Go, and Xfinity all use silverlight, not flash, for their videos. My solution is to install PlayOnLinux, and run Firefox through wine. Then, install silverlight in the same prefix as Firefox.
You have to use the wine version of firefox for these sites, but it works decently well. The automatic video quality usually sets the quality really low, but everything is watchable.
If light on resources is your top priority, you can run your videos in a terminal with mplayer, no GUI == less resources
mplayer /path/to/my/video
Note: You don't have to type the videos name every time, just type mplayer and drag the videos icon on to the terminal.
To choose a custom resolution, swap the -x and -y values for your resolution. -fs starts the video in fullscreen.
mplayer /path/to/my/video -fs -x 1280 -y 720
Some other use full perimeters include -nosound to run muted and sub /location for loading sub titles.
mplayer /path/to/my/video -nosound sub /location/of/sub/titles
To get a list of peramiters type mplayer in a terminal or go this page for a full manual.
I highly recommend a frontend to set up your video options, even if you don't want to use it for playback, I like smplayer
sudo apt-get install smplayer
Heres a quick explination of auto subs, but it must be set up in smplayer I could not find any shell commands for this
From the menu go to -> Subtitles -> Find Subtitles on OpenSubtitles.org A “Find Subtitles” dialog box will appear. In the Options, set the proxy settings if you are using any. From here
It will automatically search for subtitles on OpenSubtitles.org and display a list of available subtitles. Select any one from list and download that.
For codecs, all most users will ever need (and you should already have) is
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras
Best Answer
This might have to do with a layer of abstraction on top of Flash. You can try to install the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL):
Reboot your browser afterwards. This will not work on Chrome, though.
Sources: