Diagnosing persistent Flash streaming failure for DRM content

I'd followed most of the advice I could find online, but ran across these extra steps to get the HAL working. It comes from a post on Amazon's Prime Instant Video support thread:

Stephen Gutknecht says:

On a new (virgin) install of Ubuntu 13.04 x64/x32 - there are some steps that I don't see getting enough attention.

In addition to:

close your Chromium/Chrome and Firefox:
sudo apt-get install libhal1 hal

***also do***

sudo mkdir /etc/hal/fdi/preprobe
sudo mkdir /etc/hal/fdi/information
/usr/sbin/hald --daemon=yes --verbose=yes
rm -rf ~/.adobe
rm -rf ~/.macromedia

Then open Chromium / Firefox fresh and give it a try!

This is what I did and have DRM FLash videos working smoothly in Chrome on Ubuntu using the Adobe Flash plugin with HAL installed.

OK well that was dumb. I had been installing (and re-installing) flashplugin-installer. When I instead switched to adobe-flashplugin, that brought my version up to 236 (that is, 11,2,202,236) and it also made the test page work.

Subsequently, a test at the NBC streaming site also worked.

Thus, it appears that in addition to doing the HAL stuff as described in the other question, it may also be necessary to be running the latest Flash version. For me, that required installing adobe-flashplugin instead of flashplugin-installer.