Facebook downloader, explained

Not by us. We read the file list from the video's own public metadata and stream the one you pick straight through, byte for byte. No watermark is added, no frame is re-compressed, and no branding is burned in.

Facebook publishes most videos twice: an HD pass and an SD pass. Both are listed, HD first. Picking the top row gives you the same MP4 Facebook hands its own player at that quality — a Facebook video download in HD with nothing altered in between.

Nothing is upscaled either. If the uploader posted a 480p clip, 480p is the ceiling, whatever another site claims about 4K.

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HD, unless you have a reason not to. It is the top row, and it is the same file Facebook plays when you switch its own player to HD.

SD is there for a metered connection or when you are sending the clip on in a chat — a smaller file at a lower resolution. Both come from Facebook; neither is produced here.

One caveat worth being straight about: the HD pass is Facebook's own copy, not the untouched file the uploader picked from their camera roll. That copy is the ceiling for any HD Facebook video downloader — no tool can reach the original, and any that claims to is guessing.

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Because Facebook decides how many passes to publish, and it does not always publish two.

• Short reels and older uploads frequently exist as a single progressive file. One row is the complete set in that case.
• Some videos expose their HD pass only to a signed-in viewer. Our server never signs in, so a pasted link gets the SD pass rather than nothing. If you can watch that video while signed in, the private video downloader page reads the page source your own browser received, and the HD pass is usually in it.
• Live broadcasts and premieres are a special case: while they are running there is no finished file to fetch. After the broadcast ends and Facebook publishes the recording, the same link usually works.

Where two passes exist, both are listed. Where one does, listing an imaginary second row would be a lie dressed up as a feature.

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Yes, always. This is worth explaining because it is the most common way a Facebook downloader goes wrong.

Alongside the progressive MP4 files, Facebook publishes a streaming ladder — the one its player uses to switch quality mid-playback. Those entries look attractive because they are labelled with exact resolutions, sometimes higher than the progressive HD pass. But in that ladder the picture and the sound are separate tracks, so downloading one gives you a silent video.

We ignore that ladder entirely and only offer the muxed progressive files. That is why the quality list here is short: every row on it is a complete video with its audio intact.

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Video is MP4, every time — that is what Facebook publishes and we do not transcode.

Photos are JPEG. Meta stores uploaded stills as HEIC and its CDN converts them on the way out, so the URL can end in .heic while the bytes that arrive are a JPEG. Files are named for what they actually contain, not for what the URL says.

As a backstop, the download proxy also reads the Content-Type of the response and names the file from that. If Meta ever changes how the conversion is signalled, you still get an extension that matches the contents rather than something your phone refuses to open.

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Descriptively, so a downloads folder stays navigable. The name is built from the Page or person who posted it, the video id, and the quality:

• bbc-news-1234567890123456-hd.mp4
• bbc-news-1234567890123456-sd.mp4

The quality is in the name because a video offers more than one, and two files with identical names would defeat the point of offering a choice. Page names are free text on Facebook, so accents and punctuation are flattened to keep the filename portable across operating systems.

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The proxy declines files above 512 MB. Ordinary Facebook uploads are nowhere near that, so this is a guardrail rather than a limit you will meet — a long HD broadcast recording is the only realistic way to reach it.

There is no in-page progress dialog by design: the file is handed to your browser's own download manager, so you get the indicator you already know, and nothing is buffered in a tab's memory where a large video would fail on a phone.

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No. Every Facebook video download is piped from Meta's CDN through to your browser as it arrives. Nothing is buffered to disk, nothing is written to a database, and there is no archive of past downloads to leak or subpoena.

That is a structural property, not a promise about our intentions: the proxy has no storage layer to write to.

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• Resolved video metadata — the Page name, caption, media URLs, duration — for about ten minutes, so looking up the same link twice does not hit Facebook twice. It expires on its own.
• Rate-limit counters, cleared at the end of each one-minute window.
• Ordinary web server access logs, kept for as long as the host's default, for abuse investigation.

No media, no accounts, no download history. The privacy policy spells out the same list in more detail.

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Not for the download itself. Your browser asks our server, our server asks Facebook, and the bytes come back through us — so Meta sees a request from this server, with no referrer or fingerprint of yours attached, and nothing appears in your Facebook activity.

One deliberate exception: the preview thumbnail in the results panel is loaded by your browser directly from Meta's CDN, with a no-referrer policy. It keeps the page fast and the bandwidth honest. Blocking images for this site removes that connection without affecting downloads.

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No analytics scripts, no advertising trackers, no third-party pixels, and no cookies at all. In particular there is no Facebook pixel on a site about Facebook, which would be a strange thing to explain.

One value is written to your browser's local storage: whether you prefer the light or dark theme. It never leaves your device.

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An fb video download that fails has almost always failed at the link rather than at the file. The error message on screen names the specific cause. In order of how often they come up:

• The link points at a profile, a Page, or a feed rather than at one video.
• The post is friends-only, in a private group, or age-restricted, so its video is not publicly served. If you can already watch it while signed in, the private video downloader page handles that case by reading page source your own browser fetched.
• The video was deleted, or the id in the link has a typo.
• The post has no video in it — a text post, a shared link, or a photo-less status has nothing to save.
• Facebook served this server a login wall instead of the page. That one is usually temporary, and the tool already retries through several different front ends before giving up.

If the message says something went wrong on our side rather than naming one of the above, waiting a minute and retrying is genuinely the right move.

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Not by pasting the link here. This downloader fetches the video from our own server with no session, so it sees what any logged-out visitor sees — and a friends-only or group video is not that.

There is a second path for videos you can already watch, and it works the other way round: you open the video in your own signed-in browser, copy the page's source, and paste that in. We never sign in and never ask for your password, because the fetch is done by the browser that already has access. The private video downloader page walks through the three steps — it is linked in the header as Private.

What neither path does is get past an audience setting. If Facebook does not show you the video, its page source does not contain it either. Stories are the same story: they are only served to signed-in accounts, and if it is your own, the Facebook app can save it directly.

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Meta's CDN URLs are signed and time-limited. If you leave a results page open for a while, the links behind those buttons go stale even though the page still looks fine.

Run the lookup again to mint fresh ones. Nothing is wrong with the video or with your link.

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There is a per-address cap of twenty lookups a minute. It exists to stop one scripted client from burning through Facebook's tolerance and getting this server throttled for everybody.

The message tells you how many seconds remain. Downloading files you have already resolved does not count against the cap — only new lookups do.

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Each upstream request is given twelve seconds before being abandoned, so a hung connection cannot leave you staring at a spinner.

This is almost always transient. Try again; if it persists for several minutes, Facebook is likely having a bad time rather than your link being wrong.

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Not without their permission. The person or Page that uploaded it owns it, and a download button does not transfer that.

What this tool is for: saving your own uploads, and keeping a personal offline copy of things you are allowed to keep. Re-uploading someone else's video as your own is a copyright problem regardless of how you obtained the file — and on Facebook it is also the fastest way to get a Page struck.

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Only with a licence from the rights holder. Advertising, client work, paid content, and monetised compilations all need permission, and "it was public" is not a defence.

If you are unsure whether your use qualifies, that is a question for a lawyer rather than for a download page.

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There is nothing here to take down — no copy of your video exists on this server. Files stream from Meta's own CDN to whoever requested them and are never retained.

If content of yours is being hosted or redistributed somewhere else, that host is the effective place to file. Our copyright policy explains what we can and cannot act on.

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