How to download Facebook videos to your computer (PC or Mac)

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to download Facebook videos to your computer. Whether you’re on a PC or Mac so you can reuse and repurpose your videos on YouTube, Instagram, or other social media sites. Stay tuned.

Get your free Facebook Live Cheat Sheets: https://saranguyenonline.com/special/facebook-live-cheat_sheets/

★Software mentioned★
Parallels Toolbox for Mac and Windows: https://saranguyenonline.com/parallelstoolbox
iTube Studio: https://itube.aimersoft.com/
JDownloader: http://jdownloader.org/
FB Down: https://fbdown.net/
BitDownloader: https://bitdownloader.com/

How to download Facebook videos to your computer (PC or Mac) – Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Sara Nguyen, and on this channel, I make tech and social media easier for awesome entrepreneurs like yourself. If you’re new to this channel, consider subscribing for all of the latest product reviews, social media marketing tips and training.

And at any time during the video, check out the description for links to all the resources mentioned in this video. Let’s get into it.

So there’s really lots of different ways that you can download your Facebook videos, whether they’re Facebook live streams or the videos that you have uploaded yourself to Facebook. It doesn’t really matter.

The approach is pretty much the same, and I have different ways to show you so that you can choose which one suits you and how you want to work. There’s no real right or wrong way, so just have a look at the different options and choose which one works for you.

So the first way that we’re going to approach downloading our Facebook videos is by

using the feature within Facebook itself.

So let’s go over to my Facebook personal profile and I’ll show you how to do that first.

So if you’ve gone live from your personal profile and you want to download that video, you’ll see on your personal profile the video, whether it’s the livestream or the uploaded video, will be posted to the timeline.

You’ll see where there’s a timestamp here I went live and hour ago for the purposes of this demonstration. If your video is older, it will have the date. So you want to select that. Once you’ve selected that, Facebook will open up this video for you.

And once all of the features have loaded in the top right-hand corner, you’ll see there are three dots. If you select these three dots, you can then go to Download Video. Once you’ve selected that, Facebook will open up the video for you in another browser.

And from here you can right click on the video and go Save Video As and then you can choose where you want to save this to, whether it’s your desktop or download files and you click on save.

And then this will now save the file directly to your computer. So if I have a look on my desktop, I can see the video file there and I can open it with a video player of my choosing. There’s the video there.

And that’s how you download it from your personal profile. Now to download the Facebook livestreams that you’ve done from your Facebook page, your business page, not your profile, you’ll need to obviously start at your Facebook page.

We need to go to the Videos Tab and this will have a list of all of the videos, whether they’re Facebook livestreams or whether they’re uploads. Find the video that you want to download.

So this is the one that I’m going to download. Which one? This one here, this was a Facebook livestream. So I’m going to click on that one. And this will open up the video in a minute or so.

And once it’s loaded, once again, like how you did on your personal profile, select the three dots at the top here and then go to Download Video. This will open up your video and then you can right click and go to Save Video As, and then save it to the location of your preference, which would be my desktop.

And now this has saved to my desktop. And when I look at my desktop I can see the video is here and I can play it, and there it is. Now the second way I’m going to show you to help you download your Facebook videos is by using third party software.

So we’ve looked at how to do it directly from Facebook, but you can also do it using third party software, and this allows you to get a higher resolution download of your video and just have a little bit more control.

And sometimes for whatever reason if you’re stuck you just can’t download it directly from Facebook, using the software is the way to go. I’m going to talk about three different software options that I personally use and just the pros and cons and the differences between them. The first option is something called

Parallels.

It’s Parallels toolbox, it’s for Mac and PC and it’s a really great tool. I like this tool because it allows you to download your videos, but it also has lots of other options.

And if we open up the Parallels toolbox here, you can do things such as hide your desktop, so if you’re broadcasting and sharing your screen like I do often it will hide your desktop so people don’t see the chaos with all the files and the videos, not that I have that, but it can hide your desktop so you’re presenting and it’s clean.

You can do other things. You can record your screen, it can take screenshots. I’ve used it to free up memory, I’ve used it to do a bunch of things.

And in one sense it’s a very powerful tool. In another sense, it’s got probably more things that you may even need to use, but it’s a really good option.

So it is for PC and Mac and it’s a yearly fee, which I don’t mind because I find that when you pay for software, you support the developers and then they can continue to enhance the software so that we can have a better experience.

That’s my belief anyway. So this is a great option and I’m going to show you how to use it. So once you’ve got Parallels Toolbox downloaded, whether it’s to your Mac or PC, open up the application.

And then you’ll be able to open up the Download Video option from the menu. So this Download Video here. Now before we go and download the video, I need to take you back to the video.

So remember this video that we downloaded not too long ago, if we right click on this video, I’m going to go to Show Video URL. And then I’m going to take this entire link and I’m going to copy it.

So I’ve got my video link, I’ve got the Parallels’ Download Video option open, and then I just paste the link and then like magic, it is processing the link and it’s downloading it now.

And then the download is complete. So I’m going to go to show in my Finder and there it is. That’s the video that I just downloaded. So it’s a couple of clicks. You can paste the URL that I showed you how to and then you’ve got a version of it.

Now the second piece of software that I use to download Facebook videos is something called

iTube.

And when I first heard of it I thought this sounds like the scammiest, dodgiest piece of software I’ve ever heard. But I was desperate at the time so I went ahead and I gave it a go and it actually is a really great piece of software and really well supported.

Every time I email support they messaged me back within like minutes and I’ve never had any problems with them at all. So with iTube HD Video Downloader, it’s also known as iTube Studio, you have the option to download it for Mac and PC and you have the option to purchase it and the pricing is pretty reasonable as well.

So you can buy it for 24.95 usd for a year or you can buy it for 34.95 and get lifetime updates. So for me, I personally have the lifetime update version and I haven’t had any problems and I’ve been using it for years.

So with Parallels, they’ve got a yearly fee. For iTube Studio, they’ve got options where you can pay yearly or you can pay the lifetime fee. So once you’ve downloaded and purchased iTube Studio, you want to go back to your actual video and once again grab that URL, so show the video URL and grab it from here.

So you want to copy it. You want to open up iTube studio and then you want to paste the URL. So once I’ve pasted it, you’ll see that it’s streaming and it’s downloading it right here for me now.

And it’s downloaded the file. I can go to downloaded and then from here I can have a look at the video file itself. And there it is.

Now, if you’re having problems downloading, whether it’s on Parallels or on iTube studio, one of the things that you want to watch for is whether or not your video is public. If you’ve created a video and it’s not public, you’ll know, because on the video itself, you’ll see the little icon here.

It’s got the little friends icon. It’s only public if it has the public and the little globe icon there. So if you’re having problems downloading it from a third party app, that’s probably the reason why, but I’ve just showed you how to do it via iTube studio and via Parallels.

And from there, there’s one more option that I’m going to show you. The third way I’m going to show you is with a piece of software called

JDownloader.

Now, JDownloader is completely free. It’s open source software. So unlike iTube Studio or Parallels, you don’t have a ongoing cost or a once-off cost to use it.

It’s completely free. It’s for Mac and for PC. The only thing that you need to be aware of is that with JDownloader, it doesn’t just look for the videos and download your video, you’ve got to be careful to only open it when you’re looking to download a video.

Otherwise, it will take all of your links and try to download the entire webpage and every single image on that page. So it’s not just looking for videos, it’s looking for anything that it can download.

But let me show you how it works. So once you’ve downloaded and you’ve got JDownloader on your computer, we’re going to go back to the video. We’re going to copy the video URL and I’ve done that before, but I’m going to do it again. And then we’re going to go to JDownloader.

And then from Link Grabber we’re going to paste the link and now you’ll see that the video is here. And then all I need to do is I can press this play button here or I can right start and go to download, start downloads.

And now it’s downloading the actual video. And I just have to wait for it to finish. Oh, and there it’s finished. And now when I go to my download section, here’s the folder here and I can see the video that I’ve just downloaded and I can open it with whichever software that I choose.

So it’s really quick. It’s great for downloading, not just from Facebook but from YouTube. If you have YouTube videos that you want to download that you want to reference or any particular reason, it’s a really great tool.

Any of them will actually do that. So iTube Studio, Parallels will also do it. And JDownloader will also download not just your Facebook videos but also YouTube videos and majority of the video platforms out there.

And the third way of downloading your Facebook videos or any other videos really, whether it’s YouTube videos or another streaming platform video, is to use a web based downloader. So the one that I use or have used is

BitDownloader.

You go to the URL, you paste your video links. So I’ve showed you about four times now, but I’ll do it again. Go to the video, grab that URL, go to the site, paste it, and then select download. This will typically open up ads. So just close the ads.

And once your video is ready, you’ll see here it says that it’s ready to download. You can choose whichever resolution that you’d like to have it in.

So I’m going to go to standard definition, select download. It’s opened it for me here and now I can right click and Save The Video As, save it to my desktop. And that saved the file to my computer and I can open up that file once again. And there it is. If you don’t like BitDownloader,

FBDown

is another site that allows you to download your Facebook videos as well. And there you have it.

So there are a couple of options that I walked through. We talked about how to download your Facebook videos using the Facebook features itself from your personal profile and from your page.

I showed you software option using Parallels toolbox, iTube Studio and JDownloader. I gave you a bunch of free, quite cost effective and paid options as well. And I also showed you more freeways using web-based downloaders.

So now you can download your Facebook livestreams or videos and repurpose them, send them to your video editor, create the square version with the little captions or add them to other videos and just reuse and get more use out of your videos.

If you found this tutorial useful, give me a thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to my channel. Also, if you’re interested in using Facebook live to grow your business, downloading and re-purposing your videos is just one part of the equation.

You also need to figure out what topics to talk about, what to say, how to go live, and what other equipment you need to use. So I’ve put together a Facebook Live Cheat Sheet.

It’s a super simple guide to walk you through the basics you need to get up and streaming on Facebook live, even if you’ve never hit record before. To get your hands on it, simply click on the link in the description box below.

And thanks for watching.

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Sara Nguyen

Video and Course Creator | Online Marketing Strategist | Wine Lover | Coffee Addict | Geeky techy lady| 😀 Helping small businesses build and grow their business using social media with ease.

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