How do I play movies on Google Play?

Solution 1:

Answering my own question because I was unable to find the solution anywhere on the Internet, and so I eventually had to turn to Google support, who incredibly responded with a solution!

They pointed me to the following Adobe support page:

Problems playing protected video content | Ubuntu Linux, Flash Player 11

Which had me run the following 3 commands to install a necessary hardware abstraction layer and clear out some cached Flash data.

sudo apt-get install hal
cd ~/.adobe/Flash_Player
rm -rf NativeCache AssetCache APSPrivateData2

I was able to play their DRM-test movie (Grr, DRM), so I guess it's working...

Solution 2:

As of today, October 10th, 2013, using Google Chrome version 30.0.1599.66, I can watch pay Google Play movies using the HTML 5 player instead of Flash without problems.

You need to go to this link and enable HTML5 use in youtube. Afterwards Google Play movies in Chrome will use it instead of the Flash Player.

Firefox doesn't seen to work, it tries to load the HTML5 player but fails and defaults to the Flash Player.