Company
About FDownloader
What FDownloader is, how it actually works, and the things it deliberately refuses to do.
FDownloader does one thing: it takes a link to a public Facebook video and gives you the file. Photos from public posts come back the same way. That is the whole product. There is no dashboard, no library, no companion app, and no second feature waiting behind an upgrade prompt.
Why it exists
Facebook plays video in its own player and gives you no way to keep the file. Saving a post files it in a collection inside the app, which still needs the app, an account, and a connection. The tools that filled that gap mostly made the trade worse: an interstitial ad before the file, an account before the download, a watermark burned into the corner, or an "HD" button that hands over the SD pass with a paywall in front of it.
None of that is necessary. Reading a public video's own metadata and streaming one file is a small problem, and it can be solved without collecting anything about the person asking. This site is that version.
How it actually works
Worth being specific, because "how" is where most downloaders are vague:
- Your link is parsed and validated. Only Facebook URLs are accepted — facebook.com along with its m., web., mbasic. and touch. front ends, plus fb.watch and /share/ links — and only those hosts can be fetched. Anything else is refused before a request leaves the server.
- The video's public metadata is read. That is the same data the page itself uses, and it lists the progressive MP4 files Facebook publishes: usually an HD pass and an SD pass, sometimes only one. Facebook also publishes a streaming ladder whose picture and sound are separate tracks, and that is skipped on purpose, because a file taken from it saves silent. It is why the list you get is short and why every row on it has audio.
- You choose, then the file streams through a proxy. The proxy exists for two reasons: a browser will not save a cross-origin file with a download attribute, and routing through us means your browser never contacts Meta for the media, so no referrer or fingerprint of yours reaches them.
What we refuse to do
Nothing is stored
The proxy has no storage layer. Bytes arrive from Meta's CDN and leave for your browser in the same breath, so there is no archive of downloads to leak, sell, or hand over.
Nothing is tracked
No accounts, no cookies, no analytics scripts, no ad pixels — including no Facebook pixel on a site about Facebook. The only thing written to your device is whether you prefer the light or dark theme.
Nothing is altered
No watermark, no re-encode, no downscale, no upscale. You pick HD or SD and that exact MP4 is streamed through untouched.
Nothing is gated
No sign-up wall, no download queue, no countdown timer, and no paid tier holding the HD option hostage.
The limits, stated plainly
A page like this usually lists strengths and stops. These are the boundaries worth knowing before you rely on the tool:
- Pasting a link reaches public posts only. Our server fetches Facebook with no session, so friends-only posts, private groups, Stories and age-restricted video are not resolvable that way — their media is not publicly served. We never sign in to Facebook and never ask you for a password, on this page or any other.
- For a video you can already watch, you do the fetching. The private video downloader inverts the arrangement: you open the video in your own signed-in browser, copy the page source, and paste it back, and the same extractor reads it. The source is parsed once and discarded — never logged, never cached. What this does not do is get past an audience setting: if Facebook does not show you the video, its page source does not contain it either.
- A live broadcast has to finish first. While a stream is running there is no completed file to fetch. Once Facebook publishes the recording, the same link usually works.
- Facebook's copy is the ceiling. The HD pass is the largest file Facebook publishes — not the untouched original from the uploader's camera roll. No downloader can reach that, and any that claims 4K is guessing.
- It depends on pages we do not control. Facebook serves a logged-out server a login shell on some of its front ends and the full page on others, so the resolver tries several before giving up. Meta can change any of them at any time, and when that happens lookups break until the extractor is updated.
- Lookups are rate limited. Twenty a minute per address. It protects the service from a single scripted client getting the whole deployment throttled upstream.
Who we are not
Using what you download
A save button is not a licence. The person or Page that posted a video owns it, and downloading it does not transfer that. Saving your own uploads and keeping personal offline copies is the intended use; republishing someone else's work as your own is a copyright problem however the file was obtained.
Questions
The FAQ answers 25 of them, including every error message the downloader can show and what it means. If yours is not there, get in touch.