youtube-dl: [Facebook] Cannot parse data: unable to download

Checklist

I’m reporting a broken site support issue
I’ve verified that I’m running youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
I’ve checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
I’ve checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
I’ve searched the bugtracker for similar bug reports including closed ones
I’ve read bugs section in FAQ

Verbose log

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-F', '--verbose', 'https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=444624393796648']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs utf-8, out utf-8, pref cp1252
[debug] youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
[debug] Python version 3.9.7 (CPython) - Windows-10-10.0.19044-SP0
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg n5.0-4-g911d7f167c-20220322, ffprobe n5.0-4-g911d7f167c-20220322
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[facebook] 444624393796648: Downloading webpage
[download] Downloading playlist: 444624393796648
[facebook] playlist 444624393796648: Collected 0 video ids (downloading 0 of them)
[download] Finished downloading playlist: 444624393796648

Description

Hi there. Thanks in advance for your help. I’m trying to download a video from Facebook, but youtube-dl threw this error:

ERROR: Cannot parse data; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

Here is the line I entered in the command prompt:

youtube-dl -F --verbose https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=444624393796648

The same error is thrown with the -F tag removed.

Your help is greatly appreciated and helps with human rights investigations.

Best, Brian

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created 2 years ago
Comments: 15 (11 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

From https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/30700#issuecomment-1100763268, we can try this modified URL https://www.facebook.com/video/video_data?video_id=444624393796648:

{
  "error": {
    "summary": "This content is no longer available",
    "message": "This content is no longer available: The content you requested cannot be displayed at the moment. It may be temporarily unavailable, the link you clicked on may have expired or you may not have permission to view this page."
  }
}

dirkf on Apr 19, 2022