A reader wrote in last week, annoyed. He had a video saved from a Facebook group he belongs to — a woodworking group, nothing secret — and every downloader he tried gave him an error. Same link worked fine when a friend posted it publicly. He wanted to know which tool was broken.
None of them were. Group posts are a different animal, and it is worth knowing why before you spend an evening testing tools.
Facebook serves three kinds of video, and they behave differently. Public posts are open — any tool can read them, and most do. Group posts sit behind membership. Private or friends-only posts sit behind a login that belongs to you and nobody else. A downloader that claims to handle all three is either confused about the second and third, or lying about one of them.
In 2026 the honest answer is: public works, group posts sometimes work if the group is public, and anything marked private needs your own logged-in session. No third-party site can do that for you, and the ones claiming they can are collecting your credentials.
So when I am picking one for regular use, the question is not "does it support Facebook" — they all say yes. It is whether it handles the awkward formats cleanly.
Live replays. A finished live video is a long file with a strange container. A lot of tools time out on anything past twenty minutes and hand you a truncated clip with no error message. You find out when you play it.
Quality. Facebook serves a low-bitrate version to mobile users. A tool that grabs the first stream it finds gives you that one. Check the file size — if a ten-minute video comes back at 8 MB, you got the mobile copy.
Audio. Watch-party and shared videos sometimes arrive silent because the audio track sits separately. If a tool cannot rejoin them, you get a video of someone talking with no sound.
For the everyday case, VidTray is what I keep around. It reads public posts and public group posts, returns the full-quality stream rather than the mobile rendition, and keeps audio attached on long replays. It is a browser page — nothing to install, no account.
Using it takes three steps: copy the post link, paste it in, pick the quality and save.
On the question people always ask — no, it cannot reach a private post, and you should be wary of anything that says it can. That is not a limitation, it is the correct behaviour. If you can see the post yourself, saving it from your own logged-in browser is the right path, not handing a password to a stranger's website.
Three checks then: does it survive long replays, does it return the real quality, does it keep the sound. Everything else is marketing.
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