Many years into the evolution of Google’s “other” operating system built atop Chrome, it turns out that there’s almost nothing that you can’t do in ChromeOS that you can on a PC or Mac. Games, third-party apps from an app store, heck, you can run most Android programs nowadays too, meaning that there are thousands upon thousands of program choices!
While the zillion video streaming services are primarily aiming to be on your television set, it turns out that all of them can also be accessed via the Web too. This means your Mac, your PC, your Linux computer, and, yes, your Chromebook can be a great movie player whether you’re a fan of Netflix, MAX, Peacock, or Amazon Prime Video. Even better, most of these services have apps custom written for the ChromeOS universe too, which you can find in the Chrome App Store. In fact, for this demo, I’m going to use the Amazon Prime Video app itself…
AMAZON PRIME VIDEO ON CHROMEBOOK
Fire up the app, log in to your Amazon Prime account, and you’ll see a list of shows and movies you can watch with a single click:
Pay attention to the buttons at the bottom of the window. Yes, live TV and movies, and free TV channels are now part of the service, though I surmise most people still think of it as an on-demand TV and movie service. For our purposes, click on “Downloads” at the bottom.
Since you’ve never downloaded anything, here’s what you’ll see:
Easy to proceed from here: Click on “Find videos to download”, but it turns out that any content you’re perusing can have ‘download’ links if appropriate. Not everything you can watch live on Amazon Prime Video is downloadable, however.
It’s also worth noting that if you close your Amazon Prime account, you’ll likely lose access to your downloadable content, which is encrypted and only viewable through their video player. It’s not “here, download this movie forever” but “download it so you can watch it offline”. If you’re going to be offline for many weeks on end, that might cause trouble too as most of these apps like to check in occasionally to ensure you still have an active account. Probably good to do just before an international flight or cruise, as an example!
FINDING MOVIES & VIDEOS TO DOWNLOAD
Once you click on the “Find videos to download” it will show you some of the most popular in the current lineup:
I watch a lot of foreign language content on my Amazon Prime Video account, which is why I see shows like Panchayat (a hilarious Indian comedy) and Totems (a gripping French spy thriller). There are, however, thousands of options from which you can choose. Scroll down or sideways and you’ll see lots more choices.
I’ve settled on the 2022 horror thriller Nope from Jordan Peele. The info and buttons included the following:
Notice you can participate in a “Watch Party” if you want to view it in sync with friends, add it to your Watchlist, or even click “Play” to watch it now. Or you can click on “Download” to download a copy…
If you have lots of space – as I do on my Chromebook – then I recommend “Better” or “Best”, but obviously they’re bigger downloads and will take more time to acquire. They’ll also consume that disk space until you manually delete them so while having fifty great movies sounds fun, that can also completely take over all your available space!
I’ll choose “Better” which is plenty good enough for my 15″ Chromebook screen and click “Start download“.
The “Download” button turns into a progress indicator. Handy to ensure you don’t accidentally disconnect before you’ve finished the full and complete download. Or downloads, as the case may be!
WATCHING DOWNLOADED MOVIES FROM AMAZON PRIME VIDEO
Once you have one or more downloaded movies, you can go to “Downloads” from the bottom toolbar and they’ll show up, ready to view:
It will keep track of where you were in the movie if you have to stop viewing and restart later. Also notice that while the prompt predicted that the “better” download would consume 2.13 GB of space, the actual downloaded movie is only requiring 1.3GB of disk space on my Chromebook. A pleasant surprise!
Click on the thumbnail and the film will start showing in the Amazon Prime Video app window:
Note that you cannot use the screen capture utility to get a still image in ChromeOS. I took a photo of my computer screen with my phone and cropped it down for the above image. This is common with video players and typically also blanks out if you try to use Chromecast, AirPlay, Miracast, or similar to transmit the content.
That should get you going with the download feature in Amazon Prime Video on your Chromebook. Now the hard part; deciding what to actually download and watch!
Helpful Tip: I’ve been writing about Chromebook systems for many years! Please check out my extensive Chromebook help area for hundreds of useful tutorials and guides! Thanks.
