Video-less rooted Kindle Fire sorted

Those who purchased the Kindle Fire and the swiftly proceeded to root it to allow the installation of unapproved apps would have swiftly hit an error message when trying to play videos. “Your device is no longer configured correctly to play Amazon videos. For more information see Help & Feedback under Settings.”

Naturally, the hacker community swiftly swung into action to create a workaround. One of the biggest selling points of the Kindle Fire is its ultra-low price of US$200, which places it far and beyond the US$449 iPad.

Rooting a Kindle Fire is similar to “jailbreaking” an iPhone. Once rooted, the Kindle Fire can run unauthorised apps and the user can customise their tablet to their hearts content. Digital Rights Management (DRM) can also be sidestepped and “illegal” content is then easily uploaded to the device.

The reason for the video player going on strike is that once rooted, users are elevated to the “root” user account level and a superuser (SU) binary is added to the system. Amazon is not about to risk its precious device being torn apart as a hackers dine on it (or, more to the point, losing control of its walled garden of content).

If the Kindle Fire watchdog finds the SuperUser binary in “system/bin/su” or “/system/xbin/su” then it knows something illicit is going on, and video is rendered unplayable.

OTA RootKeeper makes the impossible, possible. The application, when applied to a rooted Kindle Fire, temporarily unroots the device, creates a backup of the SU binary and then deletes the default folders detected by the OS. Some users may also need to visit system settings > applications > all applications > amazon Video > force Stop to correct the issue. Users are then free to switch between a rooted and unrooted Kindle Fire at will.

It’s not the tidiest workaround but for users who require the best of both worlds, it’s currently the only solution. Given a few more weeks, a more elegant solution will no doubt appear.