Magnet links are also much easier to share. Users don’t have to go through the additional step of downloading and opening a file and providers don’t have to bother with a file hosting solution.Īny files downloaded from the internet come with the inherent risk malware, which does not apply to magnet links. Magnet links can be part of a web page just like any hyperlink. This may seem like an unimportant distinction, but files must be hosted and downloaded. The first big advantage of magnet links is that they are links and not files. Magnet links are becoming the norm and there are advantages to both torrent providers and torrent users driving this change. These are torrents that don’t make use of a central server to coordinate peers and keep track of peers.Ī magnet link strips out only this essential information and does away with the rest of the torrent file, since the vast majority of participants in the torrent don’t need that information. This is the same method used by the Distributed Hash Table found within “trackerless” torrents. Filtering out only those with matching hashes quickly reconstructs the swarm of peers on the network. So, for your torrent client to know who else is part of a given torrent, it simply has to compare the hash in the magnet link to the hashes of torrents that are being shared. This is useful for torrents because you can hash any two torrents and if they point to exactly the same files, they will have identical hashes.

However, there’s a lot of information packed into that string!Ī magnet link contains a unique identifier, various parameters depending on the exact nature of the torrent, and, most importantly, a cryptographic hash of the torrent files.Ī cryptographic hash is a mathematical algorithm applied to data that results in a short unique string that represents that data. In essence, a magnet link is simply a string of text.

The DHA is an important concept to remember in the discussion about magnet links. Torrent files can also contain extended information, such as a DHA (Distributed Hash Table) which allows each peer to act as part of a decentralized tracker network.

It contains information about the files that are being shared, such as their names, sizes, and information needed to do integrity checks on the data.

The file contains a list of torrent trackers (if any) that coordinate all the peers participating in the torrent.

Torrent files don’t contain any data of the files you want to download.Here’s how traditional torrent files work: But magnet links are an alternative to traditional torrent files. We won’t go into all the details about how BitTorrent works here.

How to make magnet link to torrent file