How to add Magnet Links inside Firefox

The days of the Torrent files are slowly fading away, one such entity known as the ThePirateBay is switching from Torrent files to Magnet Links. What this is going to mean for the end user is that we will not be downloading *.torrent files anymore but instead users will be using Magnet Links.

This is how to setup Firefox to use Magnet Links:

  • Open a new tab and go to about:config.
  • Right click and go to New > Boolean, for the preference name use: network.protocol-handler.external.magnet and make sure the Value it is set to true.
  • Again right click and go to New > String, for the preference name use: network.protocol-handler.app.magnet and make sure the Value is set to the location of your Bittorrent client.  An example would be: /usr/bin/transmission.

This has worked very well with Mac OS X Lion, but when I tried the same thing with Linux I actually had to replace network.protocol-handler.external.magnet with network.protocol-handler.expose.magnet and the Value has to to False.

I am slowly starting to get the hang of Magnet URI’s, lets break down one for an example:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:dbf9fe6e8adbf299f395c83b42a2cc5344ea35f8&dn=Ubuntu+11.10+en+10.04+desktop+all+languages+bootable&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.publicbt.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.ccc.de%3A80

The beginning starts off with magnet: and ends at “&” and this tells us the bittorent hash or btih for short, after the first part comes the dn or Display Name which is a set of keywords to help describe the file’s contents and last but not least is the tr which is short for address Tracker which tells us where the tracker is located and what protocol to use.

 

 

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