Can You Download A Video From Facebook?

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Whether you want to salvage a viral Facebook video to send to all your friends or you desire to keep that training for online courses from YouTube on hand when you'll need to use it in the future, there are plenty of reasons you might desire to download videos you lot discover online. Simply, you might too wonder if it's okay to save the media you notice online — from both upstanding and personal-security standpoints. Before y'all download the offset browser extension you come across or paste a URL into a potentially shady video extractor, it's important to learn about how to — and when you tin can — download videos online safely.

When Is It Okay to Download Online Videos?

YouTube, Facebook, fifty-fifty TikTok — plenty of sites are known for providing high-quality, user-generated video content. Merely is information technology actually okay to download videos from these and other sites? More often than not, if the content is probable copyrighted — say information technology comes from a streaming TV channel or news station — you shouldn't download it. Even so, there's some grey expanse when it comes to things y'all detect on social media and other sites, and it as well matters what you're going to do with them.

YouTube is ane of the sites from which people most commonly want to download videos (or just the sound from those videos). Its terms of service require you not to copy, distribute, transmit or sell content that you didn't create that's uploaded to the site unless you accept explicit written permission from YouTube or the original creator to do so.

However, there are some situations in which information technology may be okay to download media. If you already own the videos — say they're posted on your YouTube aqueduct — and you desire to back them up? That should exist okay. If you're doing a response video or parody and want to reference someone else'south content, you may non become into problem. Videos that accept Creative Commons licenses or that are public domain are besides unremarkably okay to download. However, it's best non to save content that someone else created, especially if it'due south their intellectual holding and they're monetizing it. Merely remember that downloading anything off of YouTube violates the terms of service no matter what, but it's not a criminal act to download public domain or Artistic Eatables-distributable video.

Only as y'all have precautions when opening an e-mail that might be a phishing scam, you also need to accept precautions when downloading videos online. File-sharing torrent websites and some video extractors, which are the sites on which you paste in the URL of the page that has the video you want to download and the site downloads a copy, may exist infected with malware that they deposit onto your computer when you open up the downloaded files. For this reason solitary, it's all-time to avoid torrent sites in particular — yous have no idea who uploaded the content and what they might've done to it in the concurrently.

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Instead, look to trustworthy sources for obtaining downloads. If you're using Google Chrome every bit your browser, for case, visit the Chrome Spider web Store to search for extensions you can add that help yous download videos. These commonly have ratings from users about their performance, and yous tin spend some time researching what other people recommend as the safest options. Look for those that are highly rated and the most often downloaded; they're generally the safer choices.

Brand sure the sources y'all're downloading from are also safe. YouTube videos normally don't have malware attached. Yous might also opt to download certain content like videos from Netflix, which you can relieve to your computer and picket after offline. Streaming services that allow you to do this are nigh ever safe considering that functionality exists specifically so you can download videos — just don't distribute them or attempt to make money off of them. You lot should too run a virus scanner on files after you lot've downloaded them. Chrome and other browsers may incorporate these and automatically scan files to brand sure they're safe. Enable this selection if you oasis't already.

Surefire Rubber Saving

If you want to salvage a video that you're certain is safe to continue — maybe it'southward something personal a family unit fellow member shared on social media and you take their permission — in that location's ane style to do then that may exist the safest: screen recording. Many computers and other devices these days are equipped with this feature, which creates a video of whatsoever you're playing on the device's screen while the recorder application is running.

At that place are a few limitations with this; for example, you'll demand to let the video play the whole way through and have the volume level upwardly while y'all're recording. However, at that place's no take a chance of malware contaminating the files considering they're created on and saved to your device simply. This isn't exactly a download, simply it is a safe selection if y'all want to salvage video.