Legal:
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.
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. The Original language option has been implemented in the Amazon VOD addon as “The same language selected as the Preferred audio language” (from within Player > Language Kodi settings).
Inside the Amazon VOD addon, there are also a few options to select which subtitles you want downloaded from the Amazon servers:
- None
- All
- From Kodi player language settings
- From settings, fallback to english
- From settings, fallback to all
None and All are self explanatory. From Kodi player language settings downloads only subtitles that match Kodi’s settings. The other two options provide a fallback when the selected language is not available. If, for example, you selected Italian as a language but no italian subtitles are available for the selected video, Fallback to english will try to download english subtitles, if available, while Fallback to all will download every single subtitle language provided by Amazon.
Due to some limitations, we/IS.A are currently unable to play movies with a resolution greater than 1088x464. Series/shows have no such problem, and can play up to 1920x1080. 4k Ultra HD support is still under investigation.
Some of the processors in RPis and similar are sometimes too weak to both decrypt the DRM encryption and decode the video at 1080p. 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.
The API used by the addons currently do not support Amazon Channels. Live channels can be reproduced however, and if they’re not already included in the lists can be added upon request.
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.
Depending on the OS you’re currently using, you can find the appropriate logs here:
%AppData%\Kodi\kodi.log
~/.kodi/temp/kodi.log
/storage/.kodi/temp/kodi.log
The addons cache/settings files can be found here:
%AppData%\Kodi\userdata/addon_data/<addonName>/
~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/<addonName>/
/storage/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/<addonName>/
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.