Facebook only launched its automatic video captioning program in 2017, almost a decade after YouTube.
Thankfully, Facebook's captioning feature has become more refined now, which brings great convenience to people who are learning languages or hard of hearing.
This article details how to download a Facebook video with the captions. It's all good stuff. Follow my steps, and you'll see how easy it is.
Cisdem Video Converter
Free Download macOS 13 or later 
Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
The native caption format for Facebook videos is SRT. It comes from two sources.
Auto generated by AI: If the video quality and speech clarity are high, Facebook's built-in voice recognition tool will recognize the speech and convert it to captions in different languages. Support up to 11 languages.
Provided by Author: Facebook allows authors to add SRT captions and files must be named in the filename.en_US.srt format. Authors can upload captions in multiple languages, there is no limit.
Check if captions are available before downloading on Facebook:
For regular Facebook videos: If there is a CC icon at the bottom right of the video, it means captions are available. You can click CC to view the subtitle source and supported languages.
For Facebook reels: Cannot be viewed directly. What you can do is click on your profile icon, go to “Settings & privacy” > “Settings” > “Media” and turn on the “Always Show Captions” option. When a reel contains closed captions, they will be displayed during playback, but you won't know exactly which languages are available.
Cisdem Video Converter is an excellent program for downloading Facebook videos. It can batch download public and private Facebook videos/reels. It preserves the original quality of the video, even if it's a 1080p+ video.
As long as the Facebook video contains AI auto-generated captions, the app will detect and download them along with the video, no matter how many languages are included. Its inbuilt video editor allows hard-coding the downloaded captions into Facebook videos.
Free Download macOS 10.13 or later Free Download Windows 11/10/8/7
1. Copy the video link with captions from Facebook (get it from the address bar or click “...” > “Copy link”).
2. Launch Cisdem Video Converter. Click the third icon on the top of the interface to get into the download module.
3. Paste the copied FB link into the empty input field at the bottom and click the "+" icon on the right or press "Enter" to parse the link.
Tip: If there are multiple links, click the "+" on the left to add all the links at once.
4. Select output formats and subtitle languages for added videos.
5. Click "Start" to download Facebook videos and captions. When finished, there will be a blue checkmark in the circular progress bar. Hit it to locate the downloaded file.
This method is simple. No tools are required.
You can also use Cisdem Video Converter to embed auto-translated or manually added captions into downloaded Facebook videos in bulk. View Details.
It is very handy to use online tools to get Facebook video and transcript. This method is better at grabbing captions. However, when it comes to Facebook video downloading, the quality is often not as good as it should be and you can’t batch process all at once.
GetSubs.cc is specifically designed for downloading subtitles online for Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and Dailymotion. It can download Facebook captions in SRT, VTT, and TXT formats that are automatically translated or manually added by the author.
GlitX.com is recommended by GetSubs.cc website. It can download videos, frames, and thumbnail from Facebook online without installing software. The videos can be saved up to 1280*720p MP4 only.
Although this method is free and does not require any tools, it has some limitations. Personally, I recommend using the above 2 methods.
Only users with Meta Business Suite can download your own captions from the page. Captions from other Facebook pages cannot be downloaded.
To save regular Facebook videos: Open the video, click on the “...” at the top right, then click on “Download video”. All your own Facebook videos can only be downloaded up to 720p.
To save Facebook reels: Go to “Inspect” > “Network”. Refresh the page, search “mp4” file, open it in new tab and download the video. You can't download reels directly from the Facebook web version, you need to get them from Inspect.
Name the downloaded Facebook video and captions with the same file name (e.g. facebook.mp4 and facebook.srt) and place them in the same folder, so that players like VLC and Cisdem Video Player can detect the captions automatically.
Alternatively, you can choose to add subtitle file in the player after opening the video.
But if you want to integrate captions into a video file permanently, use the following methods.
You can add multiple videos to embed captions in bulk, and you can also choose other formats as output formats such as MKV, MOV, and so on.
Handbrake is a completely free open source project. Please download it from https://handbrake.fr/. Also, after uploading captions, if you check the “Burned In” box, then the captions will be hardcoded into the FB video.
Finally, let's discuss a question: Can I use yt-dlp to download Facebook videos with subtitles?
yt-dlp defines translated auto-generated captions as subtitles. By executing yt-dlp --list-subs [Facebook URL], all automatic captions can be detected, but yt-dlp does not consider them as subtitles. The commands related to yt-dlp can only download and encode subtitles. Therefore, using the commands directly is not feasible.
It works on YouTube, see how to download YouTube subtitles.
Emily is a girl who loves to review various multimedia software. She enjoys exploring cutting edge technology and writing how-to guides. Hopefully her articles will help you solve your audio, video, DVD and Blu-ray issues.
