Reply to tatie-gisele

Just to be sure, I wasn't talking about you when mentioning Arte's door step.

And sorry, but I can't take a non tech-savvy Windows user through the whole process of setting up a linux system. The general procedure would go like this: you would get yourself a PC emulator like Virtualbox or VMware and download (for free!) the install CD image of some linux distro of your choice, likely Ubuntu. And then use that image to install linux into a (Virtualbox or VMware) virtual machine.

But if all you're interested in is the videos, if you aren't downloading a gazillion per week you can also get the download links "manually", just with your browser. I'll give you an example.

Take a video page link and open it in your browser, like this one: http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/048858-000/der-banker-master-of-the-universe

Then right-click into the page and choose "View Page Source" in the context menu, to open up a window that displays the HTML source code of the page. In that page search for the term "ALL.json".

Now, you will find multiple links containing that term, but the one you want also contains "PLUS7". In this case it is
http://arte.tv/papi/tvguide/videos/stream/player/D/048858-000_PLUS7-D/ALL/ALL.json

Take that link and remove the 'player/' part in it. The result is:
http://arte.tv/papi/tvguide/videos/stream/D/048858-000_PLUS7-D/ALL/ALL.json

Now take that last link and open it in your browser. You'll see what looks like a lot of gibberish, but in this page you'll find the downloadable mp4 links. Namely, search in this page for "AMM-HBBTV". You'll find three links that match that search, namely
http://artestras.vo.llnwxd.net/o35/nogeo/HBBTV/048858-000-A_EQ_1_VOA-STA_01335113_MP4-1500_AMM-HBBTV.mp4
http://artestras.vo.llnwxd.net/o35/nogeo/HBBTV/048858-000-A_HQ_1_VOA-STA_01335112_MP4-800_AMM-HBBTV.mp4
http://artestras.vo.llnwxd.net/o35/nogeo/HBBTV/048858-000-A_SQ_1_VOA-STA_01335116_MP4-2200_AMM-HBBTV.mp4

And those are already the downloadable mp4's, in three qualities. You can see the quality in the link name, as it contains the bit rate:
800 Lowest quality
1500 Medium
2200 HD

And that's all there is. You can get the links for a video just with your browser and a couple of simple searches in 3 minutes.

Fact is, the only "magic" involved in the whole procedure is to know that you need to remove the "player/" part in the json URL. But even Florian didn't know that, somebody told him above.

So there you have everything you need, except a tiny little less convenience than what you're used to but a huge amount of less trouble for Arte.

The above was for the German version of the video by the way, but the French works just the same. Except that some links look slightly differently, like when having "FR" for "DE" and similar. But the procedure I described is completely the same, for both languages.