I found a method involving youtube-dl and browser cookies that seems to work well without triggering security problems on Facebookâs side. I tried this in the past and it sort of worked, but not with two-factor authentication enabled (need to disable it temporarily), and it sometimes triggered security warnings, forcing me to change my account password. youtube-dl has command-line options to specify a username and password to log into Facebook.

Sadly, you canât use the network inspector (which logs and shows all HTTP requests) to grab a single video file because the data is streamed as an unknown sequence of chunks in an unknown format.įor publicly viewable videos, just use youtube-dl, or visit a third-party web-based downloader service where you can paste in a Facebook URL to get a download link that is proxied through the third-party service.įor private videos (including your own uploads), the situation is tricky and the solution is not obvious.

Ideally, you want the literal compressed video data that was delivered to your web browser for viewing, which is as clean and efficient as possible, avoiding decoding and re-encoding. You could try to screen-rip the video by capturing pixels, but that destroys quality and increases file size.

But Facebookâs implementation and behavior change continually, so the procedure may become invalid after months or years.ĭid you view a video on Facebook and want to save it to a local file? Unfortunately, Facebook never offered a download button for videos (unlike photos). This information has been tested to work at the time of publishing in Nov 2021.

Download private youtube videos firefox