How to save videos from ARTE +7 on your computer to watch them offline

[Edit (20141105)]: The old stuff below probably does not work anymore (at least, it’s pretty tedious to follow these weird instructions). ARTE has changed their web site makeup. What to do? -> Search for “ARTE greasemonkey” wih your favorite Google, then you should find a very convenient solution that is running within your browser. Case you are living in Linux, iOS or Windows, Mediathekview might be even a better friend. Enjoy & have fun!

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[old stuff starts here]

If your internet connection is too slow to watch the videos on ARTE +7 in a decent resolution, you might want to download them and watch them offline. Unfortunately, the common video downloaders that work for e.g. facebook and youtube do not work here. But there is a workaround, that’s probably why you are here: The trick of course is to retrieve the URL that points to the actual video fiel. Actually, this is very easy and all you need are a simple a text editor that writes plain text files and a browser. I have used Notepad and Firefox for this. Finding out how took me less time than writing this tutorial.

Here it goes:

On the ARTE +7 website, click in the Video image to produce an overlay showing code for embedding the video into another webpage.  You will get something like:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.arte.tv/playerv2/embed.php?json_url=h ttp://org-www.arte.tv/papi/tvguide/videos/stream/player/D/044129-000_PLUS7-D/ALL/ALL.json&lang=de_DE&config=arte_tvguide"></script>

Mark the URL that follows “json_url” (highlighted in blue above), paste it into the address bar of a new window of your browser and load it: A long line of code will show up.

There, search for the tag “StreamURL” and copy the URL that follows. In our case, it’s

h ttp://www.arte.tv/papi/tvguide/videos/stream/D/044129-000_PLUS7-D/ALL/ALL.json

Paste it in a new browser window and open it. A very long line of code will show (not shown here).

There, search for an URL containing “2200” (or another figure, representing your data rate of desire, most likely 800 or 1500 are the options), starting with “http” and ending with “.mp4”. In front of it, you’ll find the tag “VUR”. Highlight and copy the URL, in this example it is

h ttp://artestras.vo.llnwxd.net/o35/nogeo/HBBTV/044129-000-A_SQ_1_VOA_00568569_MP4-2200_AMM-HBBTV.mp4

Paste it into a new plain text file and create a HTML tag around it as follows:

<A HREF=h ttp://artestras.vo.llnwxd.net/o35/nogeo/HBBTV/044129-000-A_SQ_1_VOA_00568569_MP4-2200_AMM-HBBTV.mp4>link</A>

Save the file with the ending .html (or rename it) and load it with your browser. Point your mouse on the link and save the target on your computer. Wait a while, depending on your actual download speed. The files may be quite huge, up to 1GBytes per hour of video. If you should need a video player to view the .mp4 file, you might consider VLC. That’s it, have fun!

Edit: Meh! Sometimes the wheel gets invented twice: Have a look here, at Florian’s page, he wrote a script that extracts the links for you automatically. There you will get download links for all resolutions just by copy/pasting the URL of the ARTE webpage in question. Have more fun!