Popular video sites often make it difficult to download content, usually for copyright and revenue reasons. Instead, they’d rather you share a direct link or post it to your feed, where it will continue to rack up those pre-roll ad dollars. But if you’re looking to get a permanent copy of a clip you’ve spotted on Facebook, you probably have your reasons. And since we trust you, we’re here to tell you how to download them.

If you have software in place that you use to download YouTube videos, such as 4K Video Downloader, you can try it. Most of the tools that work for YouTube, Vimeo, and others also work with Facebook URLs. But there is an easier way to start.

Desktop Downloads

Facebook provides a “Save Video” link in the ellipsis menu next to almost all videos. But it’s not to save the video to your local storage – it only “saves” it on Facebook in a section of your account called “Saved Videos,” where you can create collections to watch later. If the owner removes the video, you will no longer have access to it.

The steps to put a Facebook video on your computer are a bit complicated, but not difficult. First, in your browser, click the three-dot ellipsis menu on a video and select Copy link. (You might not see this option if the video is listed as private.)

Paste it in a new browser tab and watch it pass the shortened link (starting with https://fb.watch/) to something that begins with https://www.facebook.com/watch/. In the address bar, replace the “www” with “basic. “

A Facebook mobile page on the desktop.

This forces the browser to load the mobile version of the page for you. Right click on the video, and select Open a link in a new tab. In this new third tab, all you will see is the video, and you can right click again and select Save video as to put it on your PC.

Increase the resolution

The downside here is that you don’t get particularly high-res video this way.

The easy solution is to skip this complicated thing and use FDown.net (formerly FBDown.net, but they dropped a letter for simplicity). It’s ad-supported to keep the lights on, but some are ad traps with boxes that say “Start” or “Start Download” so don’t click on them.

Paste the Facebook URL you retrieved by selecting Copy Link from the ellipsis menu. The site will analyze all the content for you and provide links to retrieve either the “Normal Quality” version (the same one you get with the steps above) or an “HD Quality” video. I used it to grab a movie trailer and the normal quality was a 4.6MB bulk file; the HD was a beautiful 27MB file.

You can click on the links or right click to select Save link as. The More Options area can try to force a download in standard definition or high definition, and also perform an audio fix.

If you are using Google Chrome browser and find that you use FDown.net a lot, consider entering its extension called PLUS Video Downloader. It puts a download button directly on the video if it is downloadable. It is, however, one of the many extensions from many developers that allow Facebook downloads. Try a few and pick a favorite.

If you come across a video that you can’t upload to Facebook, try first FDown.net/private-downloader.php. If that fails, try a screen recording tool to capture it during playback.

Mobile downloads

It turns out that FDown.net shines on mobile devices as well, whether it’s Android or iOS. The caveat is that this does not work with Safari browser on iOS. It’s also not great with Chrome, according to the developers. They recommend using Firefox mobile. It won’t work on private videos either, but you might not know they are private until the last step.

FDown.net on Mobile Firefox

Find a video on Facebook (in any browser) and click the option to To share this. Then in the share screen, find the option to Copy link. Then open Firefox, load FDown.net, paste the URL and press download. You will see the options to get a video again in normal quality or in HD quality; press and hold your finger on the one you prefer and you will get an option that says Download link, then a Download now confirmation.

This places the video in the Downloads section of the Firefox browser. You can access it via the Firefox hamburger menu at the bottom right (the three lines). Click on the video link, it will probably look like a long string of numbers. On iOS, you can tap Record video to put it in your device’s camera roll.