magnet links don't work

[Manuel López-Ibáñez]

Simple. Magnet links don't work. This is a well-known problem. Fixes are available:

http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Kubuntu_Quantal_Internet#Set_Firefox_to_use_KTorrent_for_magnet_links

Why not make it work out of the box?

Example:

magnet:?xt=urn:ed2k:31D6CFE0D16AE931B73C59D7E0C089C0&xl=0&dn=zero_len.fil&xt=urn:bitprint:3I42H3S6NNFQ2MSVX7XZKYAYSCX5QBYJ.LWPNACQDBZRYXW3VHJVCJ64QBZNGHOHHHZWCLNQ&xt=urn:md5:D41D8CD98F00B204E9800998ECF8427E

It works out of the box with Chromium.

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS"

[Kenta-6 (kenta-6)]

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009102814 Ubuntu/8.04 (hardy) Firefox/3.0.15
Build Identifier:

Make the magnet URI scheme work for browser content.

For example HTML5 <video src="magnet:...etc..."> or <a href="magnet:...html">

This could be done by firing off an external P2P application, or having one or more P2P protocols internally supported.

Reproducible: Always

[Praveen Arimbrathodiyil (pravi-a)]

At the minimum, associating a magnet link with a p2p program should be available similar to handling irc:// links.

[Psychonaut (psychonaut)]

I'm not sure if it makes sense to use an external P2P application for embedded media; there's no guarantee that the application is going to put the file where the browser can find and use it.

For link targets, however, magnet URIs seem to work already in Firefox (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2); the first time one clicks on a magnet: link one gets a dialog asking for which external application to use. (Or maybe it just works right away if the OS has a registered protocol handler.)

However, it doesn't work with SeaMonkey (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20120215 Firefox/10.0.2 SeaMonkey/2.7.2). Trying to open a magnet: link results in an Alert dialog which says "magnet is not a registered protocol". In order to get magnet links to work one must first register the protocol using the about:config editor.

I think that Firefox's solution should be adopted across the board; magnet links have been around for years now and are becoming increasingly common.

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

Setting this in Firefox is definitely not the correct way to fix it. The correct way to fix it is for ktorrent to state that it handles these links in its desktop file, then it will work automatically