Skip to content
GrabVid

Download Facebook Videos

Save public Facebook videos, Reels and Watch clips as MP4 in HD or SD.

How to download from Facebook

  1. 1

    Get the video link

    Click the three dots on the post and choose Copy link, or open the video in its own page and copy the address. Short fb.watch links from the mobile share sheet also work.

  2. 2

    Paste it in the box

    Facebook URLs collect a lot of tracking parameters. Leave them in, we only read the video ID.

  3. 3

    Choose HD or SD

    Most Facebook videos come in exactly two versions. HD for watching properly, SD when you need something small and fast.

Facebook tools

Different kinds of Facebook content behave differently once you try to save them, so each one gets its own page.

Facebook Reels DownloaderMeta's short vertical format on Facebook, saved at the resolution the upload carried.

What you can download from Facebook

Facebook video is spread across several surfaces that grew up at different times, and they don't all store media the same way.

Feed video posts
The classic case, a video posted to a profile, page or public group. Usually available in an HD version around 720p or 1080p and an SD version near 360p.
Facebook Reels
Vertical short form video at 1080x1920, Facebook's answer to TikTok and Instagram Reels. Links use /reel/ followed by a numeric ID and download like any other video.
Watch videos
Longer content published through Facebook Watch, including shows and episodic uploads. These have proper HD versions and are often the best quality video on the platform.
Finished live broadcasts
A live video that has ended and stayed on the page becomes a normal video and can be saved. Broadcasts still running, or set to delete after streaming, cannot.
What stays private
Videos posted to friends only, private groups, or personal profiles with restricted audiences are not accessible. If you had to be logged in and approved to see it, it isn't public.

A practical guide to Facebook video

Why Facebook only gives you two choices

Compared to YouTube's long ladder of resolutions, Facebook keeps things simple: an HD rendition and an SD one. That's a deliberate design decision. Facebook's video is mostly consumed in a scrolling feed on mobile data, where fast start matters more than pixel count, so a big menu of options would be wasted complexity.

For you it means the decision is easy. Take HD unless storage or connection speed is genuinely a problem. The SD file exists for slow connections and metered data, and at 360p it looks exactly like what it is. On anything bigger than a phone, the difference is immediately visible.

Finding a link that actually works

Facebook has more link shapes than any other platform here. You'll see facebook.com/watch/?v= followed by digits, facebook.com/pagename/videos/ followed by digits, facebook.com/reel/ followed by digits, and short fb.watch addresses. All of them contain a numeric video ID and all of them work here.

What doesn't work is a link to the post's parent page or a group feed. If your URL doesn't contain a long string of digits somewhere, you probably grabbed the wrong thing. Open the video so it fills the player, then copy from there. On mobile, the three dot menu on the post gives a cleaner link than the address bar.

Ignore the tracking parameters. Facebook appends things like fbclid and a set of ref values to almost every link it produces. They're noise, they don't break anything, and stripping them by hand is a waste of time.

Public versus private, and why it matters

This is the single biggest source of confusion on Facebook. The platform is built around audience controls, so the same link can show a video to you and a login wall to everyone else. When a download fails here and the video plays perfectly in your own browser, that gap is almost always the reason.

The test takes ten seconds. Open a private or incognito window, paste the link, and see what Facebook shows someone who isn't signed in. If the video plays, it's public and we can fetch it. If you get a login prompt, the uploader restricted the audience and that restriction is theirs to make.

Sensible use of what you save

The common legitimate cases are straightforward: keeping a copy of a video you posted yourself, saving a public announcement for a presentation, archiving a page's content that you manage, or holding onto a clip for offline viewing.

Where it goes wrong is re-uploading other people's videos to build a page, which Facebook calls freebooting and actively penalises. Page reach gets cut and repeat offenders lose monetisation. Sharing the original post costs nothing, keeps the creator's numbers intact, and works better anyway. If you need the same thing from other platforms, our YouTube and Instagram pages handle those.

Facebook downloader questions

HD is whatever high quality version Facebook encoded, usually 720p or 1080p depending on the upload. SD is roughly 360p and can be a quarter of the size. For a five minute video that might be 80 MB versus 20 MB. On a phone screen the gap is much less obvious than the numbers suggest.

No. Private group content requires membership and an authenticated session, which this tool doesn't use. Even public groups sometimes restrict media to members. If you can't see the video while logged out of Facebook, it isn't public and the download will fail.

Yes. The mobile share sheet produces fb.watch links and we follow the redirect to the full video address automatically. You can also paste the long facebook.com/watch/?v= form or a /videos/ permalink from a page. All three resolve to the same video.

Facebook re-encodes every upload, and historically it compressed harder than YouTube did. A 1080p file uploaded to Facebook comes back softer than the same file uploaded to YouTube. That's a platform choice made for bandwidth reasons, and the download reflects whatever Facebook actually stored.

Yes, as long as the Reel is public. Paste the /reel/ link and it downloads as vertical MP4, normally 1080x1920. Reels from private profiles or restricted audiences aren't accessible, same as any other private content on the platform.

Saving a public video for your own offline viewing is generally acceptable in most jurisdictions. Redistributing it, especially commercially or as your own work, runs into copyright. Facebook's terms also ask you not to collect content in bulk. Personal use is the safe lane here.

Almost always because you're logged in and we aren't. Being signed in to Facebook gives you access to friends only posts, group content and audience restricted videos that are invisible to the outside world. Open the link in a private browser window to check what's genuinely public.

No. A live broadcast has no finished file to fetch, only a rolling stream. Wait until the broadcast ends and Facebook publishes the recording to the page, then the normal link works. If the page owner set the broadcast to delete after streaming, nothing remains.

All of them, practically speaking. Facebook serves H.264 MP4 with AAC audio, the most widely supported combination there is. It plays on iPhone, Android, Windows, macOS, smart TVs and every editing application worth using, with no conversion step needed.

Also try our other downloaders

Download from TwitterDownload from InstagramDownload from YouTubeDownload from TikTok

New to this? The how it works guide walks through the whole process step by step, and the blog goes deeper on formats and quality. Before you save anything, it is worth reading our disclaimer on copyright and fair use.