How to Download & Save Facebook Videos [March 2020]

Facebook has proven to be one of the few social networks with real staying power, remaining relevant for more than fifteen years since launched.

Facebook’s Shift To Video

While Twitter and Snapchat attempt to battle Zuckerberg’s behemoth, Facebook has set their sights on a much larger target than even themselves: YouTube. More and more, we’ve seen the platform pivot and position themselves not just as a social network, but as a publishing platform for both articles and videos.

Whether you’re going on a road trip without internet or you want to build a personalized library of archived content, downloading Facebook videos is a great idea—and thankfully, it’s pretty easy to do. This is our full guide to downloading and saving Facebook videos.

Downloading Your Own Videos From Facebook

Not surprisingly, the simplest videos to save offline are those you’ve uploaded to your page. Downloading your own videos works from within Facebook’s website, unlike other social channels. Keep in mind that Facebook’s compression will affect the quality of your video downloads. Let’s take a look at how to download your Facebook libraries.

1. Start by loading up Facebook’s website and accessing your profile.
   
2. Click on “Photos” from your profile towards the top, then select the “Albums” tab.
   
3. Scroll down to the collection labeled “Videos” and select the tab labeled “Your Videos.” Live streams you’ve hosted through Facebook Live will also show up here.
   
4. Find the video you want to download from your library of content, click on the pencil icon in the top-right corner of the thumbnail.
   
5. Choose “Download HD” or “Download SD.” Live streams (if you have any) may have a lower resolution despite selecting HD.
   

Downloading Videos from Other Users or Pages

Alright, so downloading your submitted videos from the platform is simple. After all, Facebook gives you the download option right within the album collection. For a real challenge, you’ll want to focus on downloading video content from sources other than your FB library.

Facebook isn’t designed for downloading public videos, as copyright concerns abound when trying to save a video that isn’t your own. Fortunately, downloading your favorite Facebook clips isn’t as hard as you might think. There are multiple ways to do it. Let’s take a look.

Using the Mobile Site on Desktop

It sounds weird, but to get your favorite Facebook videos from other sources, you’ll need to use the PC or Mac browser and load Facebook through its mobile URL. Here’s what you do.

1. Start by loading Facebook’s typical desktop website from your computer. We’re using Chrome to download this video, so while this method may work in other browsers, we can only guarantee support through Google Chrome’s video player.
2. When you find the video you want to save (in our example screenshots below, it’s a short video of Moana-themed cupcakes), ensure you’ve loaded the video’s page into your browser. It doesn’t matter whether the video is in pop-out mode or not.
3. Highlight the URL’s “www” and replace it with “m.” Don’ forget to include “.” after the “m” to ensure it loads, and then press enter.
4. Hit the play icon to start the video, which will launch it in the built-in video player (Chrome in our example).
5. While playing, right-click over the video and choose “Save video as…” or whatever it says in the browser.
6. In the download prompt, rename the file and save the video (MP4).

The video downloads at 400×400 resolution, and since the built-in video player saves it in MP4 format, you shouldn’t have any difficulties playing the video on your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android phone, or Android tablet.

Using Video Downloader Sites

Considering the vast amount of content on YouTube and Facebook, it’s not surprising that both of these services have a wide variety of third-party sites, promising fast and free downloads of online media.

Though most sites specialize in downloading YouTube content, it’s also possible to download Facebook content from many of them, including a handful of YouTube Downloader sites that don’t publicize the ability to support Facebook videos.

Here are a couple of examples.

Keepvid.ch Facebook Video Downloader

Keepvid.ch is one of several Facebook video downloaders, but it offers more source options and higher resolutions at no cost. The website saves your favorite videos up to the maximum available for each particular video, going as high as 4K and 1o80P.  We like this site the most, especially since it is easy to use and also offers webpages for other media-infiltrated websites, such as Instagram, Daily Motion, and YouTube. For the Facebook downloader page, simply click the appropriate link on the page.

We tried this website on Firefox and Chrome. We couldn’t get it to function correctly in Firefox but had no troubles with Chrome.

Here”s what to do.

1. Visit “http://keepvid.ch/” without the quotes.
2. Choose Facebook Video Downloader from the links shown or simply paste your URL in the existing box.
3. Click Download
4. The newly loaded screen will display your resolution options, as well as audio options, if you just want an MP3 audio download.
5. Choose your MP4 resolution and click the download icon.
6. A popup will appear (MUST allow popups for this site). If permission for popups is not already set, you’ll need to activate it, reload the page, and restart the process.
7. Your new file gets saved to your current browser’s download location.

 

Getfvid Facebook Video Downloader

Getfvid is another easy-to-use Facebook video downloader that allows public and private Facebook videos to get downloaded. The process is as easy as it gets! We tried this Facebook video downloader in Chrome and Firefox. It worked the same for both browsers.

Here’s what you do.

1. Visit https://www.getfvid.com/
2. Paste the Facebook video URL into the box. Obtain the URL by visiting Facebook and opening the video.
3. Choose high definition (HD) or standard definition (SD), and a new web page will open that plays the video. Do not pause or close the window.
4. After the video finishes playing, right-click it and select “Save Video As…”
5. The newly saved file will be located in your browser’s default save location unless it lets you choose it.

Getfvids instructions stop at the point where you hit the download button. However, there was no automatic saving during our tests. That’s why we specified the right-click-and-save instructions, which turned out just fine.

Both keepvid.ch and getfvid.com produced HD copies of the video, delivering higher resolutions than videos obtained through the browser as a mobile page. If you’re concerned about the quality of your saved content, your best bet is to download the video using either KeepVid or GetFvid.

Downloading Videos Using Your Smartphone

The easiest way to get videos from Facebook onto your smartphone is to use your computer and, using a cable or a wireless internet connection, transfer the video to your smartphone’s storage partition. It’s a bit of a hassle, but it’s the easiest way to save videos to your phone without having to jump through the hoops associated with saving videos on Android.

That said, sometimes, there are certain limitations to downloading content from your computer to your phone. If you’re on the go, the only real option is to download the content manually on your smartphone of choice. Here are your current options for downloading Facebook videos on your Android or iOS devices.

Android

Since Android uses Google Chrome as its primary web browser, it’s not too difficult to save videos onto your Android device. You have a few distinct ways to do so. Using Chrome, load the mobile Facebook site on your device and log into it. You cannot use the Facebook app, as this method won’t work to download FB videos. Here’s how to do it.

1. Using the mobile site, navigate to the video you want. If you need help finding it because you initially saw it on the mobile app, you can use the Share function on Android to get a simple copy-and-paste link.
2. Once you’ve loaded the video, simply hold your finger down on it until the “Save Video” prompt appears. This may take a few moments to appear, so don’t lose patience. Tap the button, and your download will begin to your device.

Depending on the resolution and length of the video, it may take a couple of minutes to download. While there are a ton of choices for browsers on Android, we tested this specifically on Chrome and Samsung Internet, our two favorite browsers on Android right now. Both can download videos straight to your device, making it an easy task.

iOS

Unfortunately, there aren’t too many options for saving Facebook videos on iOS. However, you aren’t entirely out of luck. In iOS 11, released in 2017, Apple added a feature for recording your screen right from the Control Center. While this doesn’t work on every app (Apple Music mutes audio when you try to record using this feature), it should still work on Facebook as of 2020.

Follow these steps:

1. Open the Facebook app (or mobile website in Safari)
2. Find the desired video
3. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen
4. Tap the record button
5. Wait three seconds
6. Start playing your video
7. While your iPhone screen records, a red bar will appear at the top
8. When you’re finished recording, tap this red bar and choose Stop

The video will save to your camera roll automatically. Sometimes this takes a minute or so, especially if the recorded video is on the longer side of things.

Don’t worry about which orientation you record the video in, as you can easily crop and rotate your videos in iOS 13.

Alternatively, you can use paid apps like Keepvid Pro to download your favorite Facebook videos on iPhone or iPad.

***

Despite Facebook’s limitations on downloading videos from their site, it’s never been easier to grab videos. Whether you’re using the mobile site workaround on Windows or macOS, an online downloading site, or Chrome on Android, downloading your favorite videos from Facebook can be done in just a couple of easy steps. Even iOS, a notoriously locked-down system, has a method for allowing video downloads.

Grab your favorite videos from Facebook and hit the road! You’ll have all your favorite videos with you (zero bandwidth use!) no matter where you end up.