En my search of a solution to watch the videos of Prime Video on Linux at maximum quality, one of the answers I found on Reddit was: “pirate it.” And it’s true: if you want to watch Prime Video at anything other than 480p on Linux, you’re going to have to do it any way but the official way. On the other hand, for some time now, like the rest of the video platforms on the market, streamingThey put up ads. Can I avoid it? Not if you don't pay, but there is something that can be done.
The question is as follows: video platforms in streaming, like Prime Video, do not generate profits on their own, so they have decided that for the same price they will put up ads and charge companies to advertise. Even though they put them in the middle, both Amazon and advertisers do not care when the ads are seen; what they want is for them to be aired. That indifference is what we can take advantage of to watch an entire movie without causing us to experience a "video interruptus". About.
Prime Video without ads and without paying more
The trick, which works at the time of publishing this article, would be like this:
We start a movie, and it doesn't matter if it's in the web browser or in an app. As you can see in the following image, there is a different point in the timeline that indicates when the ads will appear.
If we don't want to do anything unusual, we can watch the movie directly, but they will cause what I call "video interruptus", that is, a small interruption in the video. Usually it doesn't last more than 20-30 seconds, and in a movie like the one in this example, which lasts more than 2 hours, they only appear once. But if we don't want to do anything, this article is unnecessary. So, let's do something.
We move forward to that position. If we are using a web browser, we can also click behind that point. The ads will appear.
When they are finished, you have to put the movie or chapter from the beginning, and the timeline will look like this:
Where are the ads? They are gone. We have already seen them and They will not be shown more than once. Now, when the video reaches the point where the ads were, what you see depends on where you're viewing the video. In the browser, it will usually act like it's loading, and in apps, you might see a full-screen image from Prime Video. Does this count as "video interruptus"? Well, I don't think so, since it only lasts a few tenths of a second. If you watch it in the browser, it will feel like there was a micro-cut and it had to reload, but it's very fast.
The meaning of all this
«And what's the point if I'm just going to swallow the ads anyway?", you might be wondering. Alejandro Sanz or Risto Mejide can give us the answer: "art is not the same as being boring" or "driving is not the same as driving." There are things that seem to be exactly the same, but they are not..
First of all, we are not doing anything against the service. Secondly, We control when advertising will interrupt us, which is before watching the video. We can pay more or less attention to it, but the ads are on, they don't bother us and everyone is happy.
Notably This works now, and it is not known if Amazon will try to fix it so that the ads are put on when they want. On the other hand, I am not subscribed to any other service - I am already a Prime Video subscriber because it is included in Amazon Prime - so I do not know if this trick works on Netflix, Disney + and the rest of the options. It is true that a good ad blocker You can remove them altogether, but that would not be legal, nor is it possible in browsers that have adopted Manifest v3, nor does it apply to applications.
With this trick, ads won't bother us