Download Facebook videos by just viewing the source code

Although facebook has 500 million active users, I have stayed away from facebook for my own good privacy reasons. Believe it or not, being on facebook introduces spam into your life and I didn't want someone else peeping into my personal life. And not having FB as a part of my life does not impact me in any way. But lately I had to sign up and login to FB as I wanted to watch a video my distant friend had uploaded. But the video was buffering very slowly and was affecting other downloads. So I thought if there could be a way to download these videos. In not more than 2 minutes I had a 100% working formula to download videos from facebook. I never thought it could be so simple. Facebook has always been under the scanner of security professionals for privacy issues and the number of bugs introduced in its web application every time it is upgraded. Here I am gonna explain this simple way to do it. I'll explain this with only firefox in consideration. Internet Explorer is not a browser for me, it's just an application that comes free with Windows..(IE users, switch to firefox and come back.)

1. Open the video which you want to download. The page will look something like this:

You must be familiar with this format "Videos Posted by" written at the top and "In this video" at the bottom.

2. Now select the text startin from "Videos posted by" and drag the selection upto "In this video" at the bottom. Now Right click on the selected text and select from the context menu "View Selection Source"

You'll see the source window something like this:

3. Press Ctrl+F to search text and search for ".mp4" This is the format in which FB stores your videos. ".mp4" in the source window will be highlighted. You'll see a parameter like
video_src="http%2a%3F%3F..." Select the text from http to .mp4. This is  your download link But you are not done yet. It is in hexa form to be understood by javascript and other server side scripts. Your browser wont accept it as a URL.

Now, in the URL you have acquired replace "%3A" by ":" and "%2F" by "/". Replace all occurrences. Paste this URL in the browser address bar and start downloading that video.

Go ahead. Download that video you always wanted to...