
Magnet link generator - tengio
https://magnetlinkgenerator.com/
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JeremyBanks
I suggest including a few of the largest open trackers by default. You'll have
a high hit rate for semi-popular torrents, and they can be faster than waiting
for a cold DHT lookup in most clients. It's a minor decrease in privacy, but
the BitTorrent network isn't really eavesdropping-resistant in the first
place.

I wish IPFS had finished their BitTorrent support so we could use their
standard gateway paths instead. The prefix
[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/f017b1114](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/f017b1114) should
identify a hex-encoded BitTorrent infohash, letting us use a full URL like
[https://ipfs.io/ipfs/f017b111464d052f755e01d1c947848ad3d2218...](https://ipfs.io/ipfs/f017b111464d052f755e01d1c947848ad3d22180476a71a94)
through any IPFS gateway, which would resolve the content using a combination
of IPFS' own network and BitTorrent with its DHT, but the implementation was
never completed.

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tengio
Good point. Is there any place where to get an updated list of trackers?

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CorralPeltzer
[https://newtrackon.com/list](https://newtrackon.com/list)

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itdaniher
This is great! Thanks for the recommendation.

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crtasm
But don't add all 54 on a magnet/torrent, two should be enough, maybe four at
most.

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qwerty456127
In qBitTorrent you can juct click "Open URL" and paste the hash itself without
any magnet URI boilerplate and it will understand.

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dmos62
I'll use the occassion to recommend Tixati [0]. I've gone through many BT
clients, sometimes coming back to them multiple times, and Tixati is
definitely my favourite. Disk usage, features, configurability, project's
activity are all great. The only semi-weird thing is that while it's free and
without adware or ads, it's also a closed-source one-man show.

[0] [https://www.tixati.com/](https://www.tixati.com/)

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riffraff
> Magnet links are an alternative way to download and share bittorrent files

but magnet URIs are not torrent specific, are they?

I'm fairly sure I'd used them in some other p2p apps years ago.

AFAIR, they are just content identifiers, and could work with any content-
addressable system that wanted to support them (IPFS, Gnutella or whatever).

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JeremyBanks
The way BitTorrent uses magnet URLs isn't quite semantically consistent with
the way other P2P networks have used them. They probably should have just
picked a different scheme.

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LeoPanthera
Is it possible to create a magnet link for a file you know a SHA-1/256 hash
for? It's my understanding that the hash used in magnets is not the same.

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jondumbau
No. You need to match all the metadata in the info part of the torrent file,
the final hash is a hash of that info dictionary. The fields you lack are
largely name and piece size, but without the original file you cannot create
the hash of each correctly sized piece. If you have the constituent file (not
just it's sha1) you could eventually get it by trying common piece sizes and
knowing its name.

*Edit, I overlooked somethkng.

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Jerry2
How does the torrent client find peers from magnet links if a magnet link
doesn't have a tracker listed?

I've come across magnet links in the past and the torrent client would just
find some peers... it was like magic.

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jchw
I believe that ultimately happens via DHT bootstrapping, where your client
finds peers to join the DHT via a bootstrapping server that provides nodes,
then DHT lookups are used from that point forward.

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anarcat
my experience with magnet links is that they are unpredictably slow: sometimes
it works almost instantaneously, sometimes it takes literally forever to fetch
the peers and the transfer never completes. busiest torrents will of course
propagate better...

I was hoping I could transfer semi-public files (say some music with a friend)
without putting them on the public trackers, but my tests with different
clients were not conclusive, so those really only make sense for busy, wide-
distribution torrents and not one-to-a-few transfers, for which things like
magic-wormhole are a better alternative.

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AnaniasAnanas
Wouldn't the issue be solved if you added a tracker to it?

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anarcat
yes it would, but then it's not semi-private and if there's a tracker, why do
you need magnet links in the first place?

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Meph504
"Copy and past"...

