» How to steal videos from Facebook

How to steal videos from Facebook

March 31, 2009 at 10:01 pm

Skip down to the instructions on how to steal videos from Facebook. (Updated! - 4/3/2010)

Get the Bookmarklet for stealing Facebook videos. (drag this link to your bookmarks bar)

Most people that aren’t tech savvy or that are uninterested in computers seem to use the internet for at least two things: email and videos. YouTube has been the standard for sharing videos on the web for a while. Google made an important purchase back when they acquired YouTube in 2006. Many websites have tried to compete, including many of the social networking platforms like Facebook.

YouTube vs. Facebook

However, Facebook video just isn’t as good for sharing videos. Facebook lacks the ability (or at least chooses to neglect the ability) of sharing videos to an audience outside of Facebook. You can share videos with your Facebook friends, or anybody else on Facebook, but you cannot embed your videos on other websites, like your blog. I’m going to show you how to get around that and be able to steal videos from Facebook.

With YouTube, you can upload videos, view them, and then share them across the internet. YouTube allows you to embed videos into your own blogs and websites by providing HTML code to embed the video directly onto a webpage. Facebook also provides you HTML embedding code, but if you try to put these anywhere outside of Facebook, it doesn’t quite work. If you are like me (which, you’re probably not, but for the sake of this article I am assuming you are) you probably would like to be able to do this. In fact, I did, and here is how to do it:

First, you will need to install a bookmarklet that I have written for retrieving the video’s URL from the Facebook video’s page. Bookmarklets are short programs written in JavaScript that you save to your browser bookmarks (or “Favorites” for those who use IE) and can then be run on any page. To install it, you need to make sure your bookmarks/favorites bar is enabled in your browser, and then click and drag the following bookmarklet link up to your bookmarks bar: Bookmarklet for stealing high quality videos from Facebook. Note: this bookmarklet will attempt to find the highest quality version of the video as possible.
After the bookmarklet is in your bookmarks bar, you should edit the name of it to be something short and memorable to you. I chose “FBV”.
Now, let’s go to a video’s page on Facebook. Find the video you want, and go to the page used to watch it.
Instead of watching it, go up to your bookmarks bar and click on your new bookmarklet. If all goes well you will be able to download the video. If it does not work, you should receive a friendly message telling you so.
Well, there you have it; you have just stolen a video from Facebook. You will either be immediately prompted to download the video, or if your browser comes with a video plugin like QuickTime or supports HTML 5 (Safari and Chrome) it will play the video for you. Also, pay attention to the URL of the video. You can use the URL to embed the video on a web page using a flash-based video player like I did in one of my previous posts. Some good flash players available are Flowplayer and JW Player.

There are potential consequences to this information. Most of my videos are marked as private on Facebook, meaning that only people that are my friends on Facebook can view them. However, anyone of those friends could use this technique to download my video, embed the video somewhere else outside of Facebook, or put it on YouTube where there are no viewing restrictions. So keep that in mind when posting videos (and pictures) on Facebook. If you don’t want them to be public to the world, don’t post them at all, because even though you have them marked as private, it cannot stop someone (like me) from using this or a similar technique to make them more public than you want.

So, I think YouTube is definitely better than Facebook when it comes to sharing video online. It is easier to share with a wider audience and get people to watch your “cool” videos. Speaking of cool videos, check out my friends’ real-life, shot-for-shot remake of the song “After Today” from A Goofy Movie: After Today Live!.

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