However, the torrent eco-system didn’t collapse because in part TPB would rely on other BitTorrent features to facilitate transfers between peers.

Although they had been introduced years before, following this announcement the relatively obscure technologies of Magnet links, DHT and Peer Exchange would be thrust into the spotlight. From their quiet beginnings people suddenly wanted to know all about these trio of terms, which prompted us to create a user guide. The mainstream acknowledgement of the trackerless torrent had truly arrived.

While .torrent files continue to be the weapon of choice for most BitTorrent users, during the last year more and more sites have brought Magnet links on board, a development encouraged by the founders of The Pirate Bay. These days most of the major torrent clients support them.

As will become clear by the conclusion of this article, getting to grips with Magnets sooner rather than later may prove prudent. To this end, today we take a look at some addons, extensions, sites and services which make the use of Magnet links just a little bit easier.

Mainline DHT Plugin for Vuze

When DHT was first introduced back in 2005, the first client to implement it was Vuze (then Azureus). Unfortunately it uses a system that’s incompatible with those used in almost every other client. That means that Vuze users are cut off from everyone else. Not to worry though as with this Mainline DHT plugin, BitTorrent users are one happy swarm again.

The plugin can be downloaded here or through the client’s plugin installer.

Magnet Tracker

Magnet Tracker is a handy script that scans a web page looking for torrent hashes. The script then displays a window in the bottom right of a compatible browser window which allows the user to download a Magnet link. Magnet Tracker supports many of the main torrent sites and even offers functionality on Wikileaks in response to the site’s adoption of the technology last year.

As can be seen from the configuration window below, the script also allows for the customization of the Magnet link, such as with the addition of any number of additional trackers to add that extra downloading power should it be needed.

Magnet Tracker requires Firefox and GreaseMonkey to run and can be downloaded here.

Magnet Catcher

Continuing on the theme, Magnet Catcher strips the concept of adding Magnet links to a page right back. As can be seen from the before and after screenshots below, this script adds Magnet links straight to the main searchpage of a site containing torrent hashes, with no need to click-through to the torrent details page.

Magnet Catcher requires Firefox and GreaseMonkey to run and can be downloaded here.

Magnet Link Generator

If you already know the hash value of the material you want to download from BitTorrent, this basic webpage will convert it into a Magnet link.

Don’t let the foreign text put you off – simply paste the hash into the box and click the button and a Magnet link will appear. Click this and your client will pull its peers from DHT and PEX, no torrent site needed.

Go to Link Generator

Mgnet.me – The Magnet URI shortening service

As can be seen from the example below, one of the downsides to Magnet links is that they can be very long and therefore difficult to share.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:d39ebe536d55ae4e422767f21eb997da11fe471c&dn=TorrentFreak.TV
.S02E12.HDTV.x264-TFTV.mov

Crucially they often have too many characters to be shared via Twitter, they are not clickable in IM apps like GTalk and MSN, and can be unfriendly on the eye. The Mgnet.me service changes all that.

Introduced earlier this year, Mgnet.me is a shortening service, much like Bit.ly or Tinyurl, designed specifically to convert Magnet URIs into shorter and more manageable links. As can be seen from the screenshot below, it also provides HTML code and a feature to post a newly shortened Magnet link directly to Twitter.

Go to Mgnet.me

Magnet Search Engines and Indexes

While many torrent sites are now offering Magnet links alongside the more traditional .torrent file, there are other sites which specialize in Magnet links only. The beauty for these sites is that they don’t have to carry .torrent files since they can generate Magnet links on the fly – as long as they know the hash of content in question that is.

Sailr

The first search engine in our list is the ultra-minimal Sailr. As shown in the screenshot below, this Magnet-only search engine has Mgnet.me implementation as standard.

Go to Sailr

BTDigg

BTDigg, is the first ever search engine for trackerless torrents. Rather than searching for .torrent files around the web like most engines, BTDigg scans BitTorrent’s DHT (Distributed Hash Table) to discover new files instead.

In theory, BTDigg should be able to discover any torrent sitting in a torrent client anywhere in the world, providing the torrent has DHT enabled in its settings. This means that torrents don’t even have to be uploaded to a torrent site, further decentralizing the BitTorrent ecosystem.

Go to BTDigg

Conclusion

Even though Magnet links (and their friends DHT and PEX) have been around for some time, the BitTorrent community has been relatively slow to adopt them as their primary route to content. The reason for that is a simple issue of supply and demand. While torrent sites, .torrent files and associated BitTorrent trackers remain in plentiful supply, most users will feel little need to make Magnet links their primary metadata choice.

However, that will all change when their favorite torrent site becomes censored by PROTECT IP or other blocking measures planned around the world.

In future – and armed with just a hash value – users may suddenly find themselves mysteriously attracted to Magnets.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time, adding that torrents may become a thing of the past.

More than a year later .torrent files are still predominantly used by the masses, but The Pirate Bay announcement did spur BitTorrent developers and site admins into action. Many torrent clients quickly added support for magnet links, and most torrent sites that didn’t already have magnets did the same.

One of the downsides to using magnets, however, is that the links are generally not easy to share. They too are long for Twitter, not clickable in most instant messaging applications and they are not very descriptive either. Mgnet.me aims to change this.

By now most people are probably familiar with URL shorteners. Services like Bit.ly can be used to shorten lengthy URLs and make them easier to share on Twitter and other platforms. However, they don’t support magnet links.

Mgnet.me is such a URL shortener, but one that’s specifically designed for converting magnet URLs into short and descriptive links.

This means that instead of this:

magnet:xt=urn:btih:&dn=Pioneer.One.S01E02.720p.x264VODO&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker
.openbittorrent.com%3A80%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80%
2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80%2Fannounce

People can share the following link in chats, tweets, or on their websites. Needless to say, this makes sharing magnets easier and more convenient than ever before.

http://mgnet.me/@p1e2

People can use the service manually by copying the magnet link and shortening it with Mgnet.me, which takes just a few seconds. However, it would be even better if torrent sites added support for this magnet URL shortener on their websites.

The magnet-only search engine Sailr already implemented Mgnet.me support recently. As can be seen in the screenshot below, users of the site can generate a short magnet URL in a single click right from the search results. Other torrent sites can do the same without having to code their own shortener, with the Mgnet.me API.

Keep on sharing.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The Pirate Bay boasted the title of “the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker” for half a decade, but a year ago this title no longer applied. On November 17, 2009 The Pirate Bay decided to shut down its tracker for good. According to the Pirate Bay team central trackers had become obsolete.

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, The Pirate Bay has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up-to-date,” the team announced.

The Pirate Bay argued that BitTorrent trackers have been made redundant by technologies such as DHT and PEX. In addition, The Pirate Bay team said that they might move away from torrents entirely and switch to offering Magnet links instead.

“We’re talking to the other torrent admins on doing magnet links and DHT and PEX for all sites. Moving away from torrents and trackers totally – like pick a date and all agree ‘from this date, we’ll not support torrents anymore’,” a Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak at the time.

The announcements led to confusion and uncertainty among many torrent users, but in reality very little changed for the average torrent user. The Pirate Bay’s dominant position as a tracker has been taken over by two new ones, and even after a year .torrents are still available on The Pirate Bay.

What was interesting to see, however, is the response that came from the development community and torrent site owners. Before last year most torrent clients didn’t have support for Magnet links, and those that did spent little time on making them compatible and easy to use. However, after The Pirate Bay’s call for Magnet support this quickly changed.

BitTorrent clients such as Transmission, BitComet and Ktorrent all implemented support for Magnets this year. The clients that already offered Magnet support, such as uTorrent and Vuze, didn’t sit still either and spent time optimizing their implementation.

Similarly, the operators of other torrents sites were also listening in and nearly all of the larger torrent sites that didn’t already offer Magnet links soon added them. In January, this was followed by the launch of the first ‘Magnet-only’ torrent index named TorrIndex. Clearly, the words uttered by The Pirate Bay operators had not been in vain.

As for the tracker that was shut down, aside from the sentimental value it hasn’t really been missed. OpenBitTorrent and PublicBitTorrent quickly took over and have been going strong ever since, and not without a reason.

Larger torrents with thousands of peers will work just fine without a central tracker thanks to technologies such as DHT and PEX. But the majority of torrents out there only have a handful of peers and for these files a central tracker is still an essential part of the downloading process.

The shut down of The Pirate Bay tracker last year marked the end of an era, but as it stands now BitTorrent trackers are not defunct yet.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.