Facebook Video – How to Download Non-Public Facebook Videos

facebookvideo

I want to download a video uploaded by a friend on Facebook for offline access. How can I do that? I tried almost all Chrome extensions on Chrome store and none seems to work. Also, youtube-dl didn't work as expected. Any reliable way to download it?

Best Answer

youtube-dl utility will work just fine, it just need your user credentials to be able to access the page. Like most sites, Facebook use cookies for this. If you copy your cookies from your browser when you're logged in and add them to the youtube-dl command like via the --add-header option, youtube-dl will be able to access the video and download it.

Here's one way to do it in Chrome:

  1. In your web browser, login to Facebook as normal
  2. Open Chrome Developer Tools
  3. Reload the page
  4. In Developer Tools, switch to the Network tab and scroll up to the first request
  5. Right click the first request and select Copy as cURL
  6. Paste the cURL command line into a text editor and look for the cookie header information. You're looking for the part directly that looks like -H 'cookie: <...>'. Copy everything within the quotes.

  7. From a terminal, run youtube-dl, adding the cookie information using --add-header :

    youtube-dl "<url-of-facebook-video>" --add-header '<cookie-header-from-curl>'

    youtube-dl will now be able to access the page and retrieve the video.

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