When it comes to online social networking sites, nothing can beat the supreme popularity of Facebook. Founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004, this ever growing networking website has 1.23 billion active users per month all across the globe. Aside from connecting to your friends and families, Facebook features common interest pages where users can post photos, music, links and videos for everyone to enjoy. Video streaming on Facebook functions just like YouTube. You can use this website to watch different video clips from interesting videos, TV shows, episode replays, down to full movies. You can even find dedicated Facebook video pages wherein you can join and share clips. To this end, many users are looking for ways on how to download Facebook videos.

There are many reasons why one needs to save Facebook videos on their computers. First is that saving videos straight on your hard drive allows future playback without the need to connect to the internet. Second is that there are tons of super interesting clips uploaded on Facebook that you cannot find somewhere else, saving them on your PC ensures a copy in the event Facebook decides to delete it. If you are a Windows user, grabbing Facebook clips is easy with tons of downloaders available out there. But for Apple fans, getting a high quality Facebook video downloader for Mac is quite a challenge.

Go to the Facebook video you'd like to download. Press 'CTRL + U' or right click anywhere on the video and choose 'View Page Source,' 'to view page source in a new window. Copy and Paste the page source into GetFVid. Desktop Software – Mac Video Downloader. For an all-in-solution that can do more than just grabbing Facebook videos, nothing can beat Mac Video Downloader. Aside from the ability to download Facebook for Mac, it also acts as an automatic video detector, video converter, simple video editor, file manager and media player.

Three Methods to Download Facebook Videos on Mac

1. Online method (Easy and Free)
2. Alternative online method
3. Software program (Pro way)
Online Method – Free Facebook Downloader

For those looking for a free yet efficient tool that can easily download video from Facebook to Mac, the Facebook Downloader is what you need best. This web-based app needs not to be installed on your PC, and using it is absolutely free. Moreover, there are no memberships, registrations or starting-up fees required. Aside from Facebook, you can equally use the Facebook Downloader to grab clips from MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, YouTube, Metacafe and all others within a few clicks.

What’s great about this online application is that you can select the output format according to your desires. It supports FLV, MOV, MKV, AVI and MP4 together with other audio/video formats. Using it is very easy, see below:

• Copy the website link of the Facebook video you want to download.
• Visit Facebook Downloader’s webpage and paste the link on the search bar.
• Click the “Grab it” button and allow the java notification pop up.
• Choose your desired format and wait until grabbing process completes.

Online Method – Downvids

Another way to download Facebook for Mac without installing any app is through the use of Downvids. Just like Facebook Downloader, you don’t need memberships, registrations or even fees just to start using Downvids. The process of grabbing videos is likewise the same. Copy the URL of the Facebook video, paste it and click “Download”.

However, being free doesn’t mean Downvids works smoothly. There are some disadvantages with this web-based app and the first one is that it only supports two websites, Facebook and YouTube. Also, you cannot choose your desired video format but only resolutions from 480p to 1080p.

Desktop Software – Mac Video Downloader

For an all-in-solution that can do more than just grabbing Facebook videos, nothing can beat Mac Video Downloader. Aside from the ability to download Facebook for Mac, it also acts as an automatic video detector, video converter, simple video editor, file manager and media player. The Mac Video Downloader supports tons of file formats such as MP4, MOV, AAC, M4A, VOB, RM, 3GP, MKV and all others while grabbing as well as converting files is guaranteed to be zero loss in quality.

You can use this desktop application to grab not just Facebook videos but also clips running from YouTube, Vimeo, Veoh, MySpace, BlipTV, AOL, LiveLeak, Vube, etc. How to download Facebook videos on Mac using this wonderful software is very easy, the very first is to download and install the software on your Mac.

• Hit the “Detector” icon on top.
• Go to Facebook using the built-in web browser.
• Play the video you want to grab and Mac Video Downloader will automatically save the clip on your hard drive.

Thanks to its batch downloading mode, you can save both time and effort to download video from Facebook to Mac in bulk. Better still, users can likewise download playlists on YouTube and manage them neatly on the library. The Mac Video Downloader is equipped with a built-in player and comes fully compatible to 10.9 Mavericks.

When you upload a video to Facebook, you can set the privacy to Public which means anyone can see it. If you have not set it to Public, then the video is a private video. If you post a video to a private group, then the video is also certainly a private Facebook video.

In this post, I will show you 5 ways to download Private Facebook Video in HD or SD. Of course, you can also use these methods to download public Facebook videos. If you see there is no Share button below a Facebook video post, then that is a private Facebook video and you can choose one of the methods below to download it.

Method 1: Download Private Facebook Video with Only Web Browser

Most videos uploaded by your friends are private videos because it is the default settings. In order to download a friend’s video from Facebook, try the following steps:

Step 1. Right-click on the private Facebook video and select Copy the URL.

Step 2. Replace the “www” with “mbasic.” in the video URL and open it in a new tab.

Step 3. Click to play this video and a new tab will be open.

Step 4. In the new tab, you can see a download button under the video. You can download this private Facebook video by clicking the download button or right click on the video and select Save Video as…

This is so easy, but this method can only download video from Facebook in SD. If you want to download Facebook video in high quality, check the next methods.

Method 2: Download Private Facebook Video with Firefox Addon

If you want to download Facebook video in HD, you can get this Video Downloader Professional Firefox Add-on. There probably is a Chrome extension that also works with private Facebook video, but Firefox is recommended.

With this Firefox Add-on, it is very easy to save private Facebook videos. You can just copy the video URL and open it in a new tab. And then in the Facebook video page, click on the Video Downloader Professional add-on icon. From there, you will see a few download options with the different video quality. You can just click on one of them to download this video.

This add-on is capable of download videos from many websites besides Facebook.

Method 3: Download Facebook Video from Command Prompt

If the add-on is not your thing, you probably going to like this open source software, YouTube-DL, which is available for downloading videos from 400+ websites. Y ouTube-DL is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I am just going to show how to get it to work in Windows. You can check this post to see how to set it up in MacOS.

Step 1. Download YouTube-Dl.exe and move it to your user folder (C:/User/YourName).

Step 2. Download FFmpeg and open the FFmpeg folder and copy everything from the Bin subfolder to your user folder where you save the YouTube-DL.exe file.

Step 3. Press Windows + R. Type “CMD” (without quotes) and press Enter. Don’t run it as an administrator.

Step 4. In the Command Prompt window, type the following and press Enter. Be sure to replace Facebook URL with the URL of the private Facebook video that you want to download.

That’s it. You will see the downloading is in progress. When it is done, you can find the downloaded video in your User folder. With a free terminal emulator app, you can also install YouTube-DL on iOS or Android.

Method 4: Download Facebook Video on iPhone

You can also download private Facebook videos on iPhone using Siri Shortcuts. If you don’t know about Siri Shortcuts, then you have missed a lot. The Shortcuts app can do many things and downloading Facebook videos is among them.

Just free download the Shortcuts app and get this Facebook Video Downloader shortcut. You can open the shortcut link in Safari to get it. Then you can use the Shortcuts app to download private Facebook videos to iPhone Camera Roll.

Step 1. Open Safari and log in to your Facebook account. Go to the page of the private Facebook video that you want to download.

Step 2. Tap the Share button (Safari) and select Shortcuts. The Safari share button since there is no Share button under any private Facebook video.

Step 3. Select the Facebook Video Downloader shortcut that you just added.

When you run it for the first time, you should allow this shortcut to access your Photo library so it can save downloaded video. When it is complete, you can open the Photos app to check the video. You can also copy the Facebook video URL and run this shortcut to download any public Facebook video.

Method 5: Download Private Video from Facebook with Allavsoft

If you prefer GUI software, then this Allavsoft is your thing. Unlike YouTube-DL, Allavsoft allows you to download any Facebook video by just pasting the URL without the need to type your login info each time. You probably don’t want to install one program to download Facebook, another to download YouTube, and another to download Deezer music.

Besides Facebook video, you can use Allavsoft to download 4K YouTube video with audio, download music from Spotify, Tidal, SoundCloud, and more without recording.

Let me show you how this software works.

Step 1. Right-click on the private Facebook video, and select Copy the URL. Next, paste the selected private Facebook video URL to Allavsoft.

Step 2. For the first time, you will be asked to input your username and password. You can choose to save the downloaded private Facebook video as MP4, AVI, MOV, etc.

Step 3. Click the “Download” button to start downloading the private Facebook video.

If you like how this tool works, you are lucky because there is a limited-time offer that allows you to save 30% when you buy Allavsoft Lifetime License key. If you are using a Mac, use this link.

Bonus Method: Download Private Facebook Video With IDM

Internet Download Manager (IDM) has been around for many years for speeding up download speed. You probably have heard of it. You can use it to download videos from many websites including Facebook.

Well, to download private videos from Facebook, you will also need an Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. Once you have installed the latest version of IDM, open the IE browser and enable the IDM add-on.

After that, when you view any Facebook videos including those from private groups, you will see a download button at the top right of the video as the screenshot above. You can just click on it to download the private video.

Facebook Downloader For Mac

Conclusion

Extract Video From Facebook Live

All these 5 methods addressed have been tested many times and is currently working smoothly. You can use it to download private Facebook videos as many as you want. Try it out and let us know which one works best for you in the comments. For me, it is Allavsoft because it not only allows me to download Facebook videos but many others. If you just want to download video from Facebook, you can use other free methods, but if you think Allavsoft is one tool for downloading all kinds of media, it is worth it.

How To Download Videos To My Computer

If there is any problem, let me know. By the way, I created the shortcut for downloading Facebook video in SD though. If it doesn’t work, let me know and I will fix it soon.