Editorial policy

This site publishes two kinds of writing: documentation of a tool we built, and guides to features of Meta's products. The standards differ, so both are described separately below, along with what we get wrong and how to tell us.

What we speak to from direct experience

The downloader is ours. Everything on this site about how Facebook actually delivers media comes from building and maintaining the code that reads it, not from reading other people's articles. Three examples of what that means in practice, because "we have experience" is worth nothing as an assertion:

• Photos are described as JPEG because the bytes are JPEG.Meta stores uploaded stills as HEIC and the URLs can still end.heic, but its CDN converts them on the way out. We know because the proxy reads the response Content-Type and names files from it, rather than trusting the extension in the URL.
• The claim that every download has sound was tested by breaking it. Facebook publishes a video twice over: progressive MP4 files, and a streaming ladder whose picture and audio are separate tracks. The ladder is tempting because its entries advertise exact resolutions. We offer none of them, because the files pulled from it play silent — which we found by downloading them and playing them, not by reading that somewhere.
• Claims about extraction reliability come from testing every method. The resolver tries several independent front ends for the same video — desktop Chrome, Googlebot, mbasic, m.facebook.com, then the embedded player — because Facebook serves a logged-out server a login shell on some of them and the full page on others. Each path is exercised separately against live videos, since an end-to-end test passing only proves that one of them works.

Where a technical claim on this site cannot be checked that way, it is not made. There are no benchmark numbers, no success-rate percentages and no "fastest downloader" claims, because none of those could be substantiated.

How guides about Meta's products are written

We do not control Facebook, so guides to its settings and its monetisation programmes are reporting rather than documentation. The rules we hold ourselves to:

• Primary sources first. Product behaviour is checked against Meta's own material — the Facebook Help Centre and Meta's newsroom — and linked so you can check it yourself.
• Everything is dated. Menu paths move and features reach regions months apart. Each guide states the month it describes and says so on the page, rather than implying a screenshot is permanent.
• No invented statistics. If a number cannot be traced to a source worth citing, it is left out. This is not hypothetical: our guide to earning on Facebook sets out what each programme requires and quotes no per-view payout rates at all, because the figures circulating widely do not agree with each other and none trace back to Meta.
• Disagreement is reported, not resolved. Where sources conflict, the guide says they conflict instead of picking whichever is more convenient.
• Behaviour that changed is described as changed. Facebook's share sheet has minted more than one link shape over the years — fb.watch short links, and the newer /share/v/ and /share/r/ ones — and a guide naming only the shape it was written against leaves a reader unable to tell whether what they are holding is the wrong kind of link or the tool is broken. All of them resolve here, and the guides say which is which.

Who writes this

Guides are published by FDownloader rather than under individual bylines, and the organisation is accountable for them. We would rather attribute honestly to the publisher than attach an invented author with invented credentials, which is a common enough practice on sites in this category to be worth stating we do not do it.

There are currently 13 guides. Each carries its publication date, its last-updated date, and a link back to this page.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and a specific report is far more useful than a general one. Email hello@fdownloader.dev with the page and the claim you are disputing.

How corrections are handled:

• Factual errors are fixed in place and the last-updated date changes, so the page's own timestamp reflects the edit.
• Substantive corrections are noted on the page rather than silently overwritten, where the original claim could have led someone to act on it.
• Routine staleness is not annotated. When Meta moves a menu and we update a step, the date moves and that is all — annotating every product change would bury the corrections that matter.

Funding and independence

Verifiable from the site itself, and from the source it is built from:

• No advertising. No ad slots, no ad network, no ad pixels.
• No affiliate links. Nothing on this site earns a commission when you click it. Where a guide recommends a tool or a route, there is no financial interest behind the recommendation.
• No sponsored or paid placement. No article, mention or link here has been paid for, and we do not sell any.
• No analytics and no trackers. No third-party scripts of any kind, and no Facebook pixel. The only value written to your browser is your light or dark theme preference, which never leaves your device.
• No accounts and no data collection. There is nothing to sign up for, so there is no user data to monetise. The privacy policy lists everything that is retained.

If any of that changes — if the site ever carries advertising or affiliate links — it will be disclosed on this page and labelled where it appears, before it appears.

What we cannot promise

Stating the limits is part of being trustworthy about the rest:

• Meta changes things without notice. A guide accurate on the day it was written can be wrong a month later, and the same applies to the tool: when Facebook changes how a page serves its video metadata, lookups break until the extractor is updated. The dates on each page are there so you can judge how much to trust them.
• We are not affiliated with Meta. Nothing here is official documentation, and we have no channel to Meta for confirmation beyond what they publish.
• This is not legal advice. Guides describe copyright in general terms because the topic is unavoidable when discussing downloads. A specific situation needs a lawyer, not a download page.
• Translated pages are machine-assisted. The localised pages are written translations rather than raw machine output, but they have not all been reviewed by native speakers. Corrections to any of them are welcome at the address above.