Facebook is booming with videos: educational videos teaching you to garden or code, those addicting and useless 5-minute craft videos, the very visibly faked videos of people catching their partners cheating on them, aliens caught on film. If there is a craving for content, that content is likely on Facebook in video form.
If you want to share that video, you can copy the link and send it to a friend, or DM it to them through the app. You can save the video, but that doesn’t actually save the video to your phone or computer's hard drive — instead, it adds the video to your saved video bookmarks so you can find it easier and watch it later on Facebook. Sometimes, though, a video is simply too brilliant or helpful to not have saved onto your phone. Maybe you want to show a parent, or access it when you’re offline. In order to download a video from Facebook, you’ll have to follow through with a few steps.
Before we get started, it’s important to note that you should hesitate before downloading just any video. You don’t want to download copyrighted content, and if you want to download a friends’ privately uploaded video on Facebook, you may just want to ask them if it’s OK before you go through the trouble of downloading. Hey, maybe they’ll just send it to you.
1. Pick a video
A screenshot of the 5-minute crafts video on Facebook we want to download. Credit: SCREENSHOT / FACEBOOK
Find a video you want to save.
2. Copy the link
You'll need to copy the link of the Facebook video in order to download it. Credit: Screenshot / facebook
Click the three dots at the top right corner of the video, and then copy the link.
3. Paste that link into a new tab
Once you copy that link, paste it into a new tab. Credit: SCREENSHOT / FACEBOOK
Paste the link you copied into a new tab to navigate to that site.
4. Delete "www" in the url and change it to "mbasic."
You'll have to edit your url to go to a very old-school version of Facebook, now. Credit: SCREENSHOT:FACEBOOK
This is what it should look like when you change "www" to "mbasic" in your browser. Credit: SCREENSHOT / FACEBOOK
In the link, delete the "www" and change it to "mbasic." This will turn your site into a very retro version of Facebook.
5. Open the video in a new tab
A screenshot of the Facebook video as a standalone on a page. Credit: SCREENSHOT / FACEBOOK
This will now be a single video on a black screen.
6. Right click, and save the video
Now you've done it! All that's left is saving the video from Facebook onto your device. Credit: screenshot: facebook
Right click on the video, click save as, and boom! You’re done.
There is an easier way, and it’s how you can also save it on a mobile device. You can download a video from Facebook in the same way you would download a video from Twitter: by copying the share link, and pasting that link into a third-party website designed to do all of that work for you. Once you have the tweet link copied, you'll want to go to a website like FB Down. There, you'll paste the copied link and click download. You can also download a third-party app like the Friendly for Facebook app, which gives the Facebook app extra features, including a downloading option.
If all else fails, you can always record your screen, play the video, and save that video to your phone or desktop that way. Screen recording is fairly simple, but it might not give you the same quality as saving the Facebook video independently.
If you have desktop software in place to download YouTube videos, such as 4K Video Downloader, try that. Most of the tools that work for YouTube, Vimeo, and others also work with Facebook URLs. But there are other methods.
Direct Desktop Downloads
Facebook provides a "Save Video" link in the ellipsis menu next to almost every video. But that's not for saving the video to your local storage—it only "saves" it on Facebook to a section of your account called "Saved Videos," where you can create collections to watch later. If the owner deletes the video, you won't have access to it anymore.
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Features Editor
I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. I run several special projects including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys, and yearly coverage of the Fastest ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs. I work from my home, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.