How can I download non public Facebook video?

Question

I want to download a video uploaded by a friend on Facebook for offline access. How can I do that? I tried almost all Chrome extensions on Chrome store and none seems to work. Also, youtube-dl didn't work as expected. Any reliable way to download it?

Answer 1

youtube-dl utility will work just fine, it just need your user credentials to be able to access the page. Like most sites, Facebook uses cookies for this. If you copy your cookies from your browser when you're logged in and add them to the youtube-dl command like via the --add-header option, youtube-dl will be able to access the video and download it.

Here's one way to do it in Chrome:

1. In your web browser, login to Facebook as normal

2. Open Chrome Developer Tools

3. Reload the page

4. In Developer Tools, switch to the Network tab and scroll up to the first request

5. Right click the first request and select Copy as cURL

6. Paste the cURL command line into a text editor and look for the cookie header information. You're looking for the part directly that looks like -H 'cookie: <...>'. Copy everything within the quotes.

7. From a terminal, run youtube-dl, adding the cookie information using --add-header :

    youtube-dl "<url-of-facebook-video>" --add-header '<cookie-header-from-curl>'
   

youtube-dl will now be able to access the page and retrieve the video.

Answer 2

Here is the simplest way to download Facebook video that doesn't require visiting another website or installing/downloading any software before hand.

1. Visit the Facebook page that shows the individual video
2. Replace the "www." part of the address in the browser's URL/address bar at the top of the browser with "touch." then press Return/Enter and that will load the mobile version of the page.
3. Play the video, then "right click" the mouse on the video and you should have an option to "Save Video"
4. Click "Save Video"

Answer 3

I'd suggest you to install apps from any of the two listed methods below... If you don't prefer installing firefox, then I'd recommed jDownloader.

METHOD 1: Flashgot addon for Firefox

I'd recommend FlashGot Add-on for this (Firefox Browser Add-on)

1. Download Firefox Portable (Browser)
2. Unzip via setup—the portable version won't change any registry. And you can simple delete the folder once your video is downloaded or once you've finished downloading all the videos.
3. Open Firefox and go to this URL: http://flashgot.net/
4. Install the FlashGot plugin on your Firefox and restart it for the plugin to activate.
5. Once plugin activated, go to your Facebook video page, and start streaming the video.
6. Once streaming, you'll notice a small video icon at the bottom of the page in Firefox.
7. You should click on the icon for a download window to appear, from where you can download the video.
8. Alternatively, once streaming, you can click on Tools → Flashgot → Flashgot Media(1) and download your video.
9. FlashGot is only supported in Firefox, and not in Chrome. FlashGot also supports download managers like Flashget, Free Download Manager, and Download Accelerator. Default Settings would work for these download managers, and no extra setup is required, if they're installed on your PC.

Screenshots : FlashGot Method - Step 6 ] & Step 8

METHOD 2: jDownloader

Also, if you don't prefer installing a browser, you can install jDownloader.

1. jDownloader is an Open Source download manager which lets you download any video/music/file*.* from almost any source. It's GUI is quite good, and you can add your file hosts accounts for free or paid downloads.
2. In your case, you can add your Facebook account to it, and just copy the Facebook video URL to the clipboard.
3. Once copied, the video will automatically be parsed by the jDownloader, and you can download it from there.

Screenshot of Adding Account for Facebook. jDownloader treats both free and paid accounts as premium.

Answer 4

1. Go to private Facebook downloader;

2. Open Facebook video, right click on the page and copy whole source;

3. Paste it in the private Facebook downloader's text box and click download.

Answer 5

I use Facebook video Downloader Chrome extension to download all public/private Facebook videos. You can get it from the Chrome web store.