This wikiHow teaches you how to download a file from the Kickasstorrents file-sharing site. To do so, you'll first need to download a program to facilitate the download process. Keep in mind that downloading torrents for copyrighted material is illegal.
The popular Bittorrent indexer The Piratebay announced yesterday that the decision was made to switch the position of torrent and magnet link download links on the website in order to save bandwidth.
Many media sites reported that The Piratebay would be dropping torrents altogether, but that is not true. While it is still possible to download torrent files directly from the site, most users will probably click on the first download link they see that is not advertisement, and that will load the magnet link instead now.
If you have never heard of magnet links before I suggest you check out What Is A Magnet Link And How Does It Differ From Torrents?. For those in a hurry: A magnet link is a hypertext link that contains information that the torrent client can use to find the data to download.
Downloaders should not experience issues when they switch from torrents to magnet links. It may take longer before the client begins the download, but that is about it.
How To Associate Magnet Links With Vuze
Another issue is that without access to the torrent file, you cannot use it in a program like Torrific which turns torrents into direct http downloads.
What most users do not know is that their torrent client will actually save a torrent file once the magnet link has been added to the client and the download has been started.
Users of the popular uTorrent client can for instance open the %appdata%RoaminguTorrent directory to find all torrent files listed in that directory. Torrents only appear here once the client has started downloading the file, and not before.
Having to start to download the files to get the torrent link is not an optimal solution, but it seems to be the only option at this point in time. Maybe someone will create a program in the future that downloads only the torrent file, for now, that's not possible.
Update: So called torrent file caching services have come to some prominence in recent time. They cache magnet link and torrent file relations so that users can download torrents directly without having to use magnet links at all.
As mentioned earlier, the main benefit here is that downloads start faster as all information required to do so are already available.
Here is a short list of these caching services that you can use.
- Torcache - While you can upload torrent files to the search for caching, it does not provide options to search stored information. You need to use a third-party program to do so.
- Torrage - Currently offline because of the Piratebay Raid.
- TorrentCaching - Works similar to Torcache. While you can upload torrents to the service, you need to use third-party services to find them again.
- Zoink - Offline as well currently.
A program supporting these services is Magrent for Firefox. It supports all four services and provides you with options to download torrent files directly when you right-click on magnet links in the browser.
Torrent sharing is a popular peer to peer file sharing method used mainly to download files like music, movie, etc. from the internet. Basically, the user installs a BitTorrent client like uTorrent or Vuze before downloading any file. The torrent client then downloads a torrent file from the torrent server to get the information about torrent index sites and where the client can download the chunks of data. On a related note, the torrent file is a data repository which contains useful information like the tracker, seeders, and leechers of the particular file you want to download. Once the torrent client knows where it can download all the chunks of data with the help of .torrent file, the torrent client calculates a unique hash code that helps in finding the peers, leechers, and seeders who are uploading those files which you can download from them.
What is a Magnet link
Nowadays, most of the torrent site is hosting magnet links instead of a torrent file. While visiting the torrent site, you might have come across the term Magnet links. Magnet link has quite a same modus operandi as a .torrent file which resides on the server. One can easily start downloading the files using magnet link which is a sort of hyperlink that consists of hash code for the file you want to download. Using a magnet link to download files will eliminate the user to download the .torrent files that sit on the server.
The magnet link uses DHT (Distributed Hash Table) instead of a tracker to download the data from a P2P torrent network. Magnet link contains all the information needed to download a file from P2P sharing network, and it is a serverless way of downloading the specific file in P2P network in contrast to the torrent file. The magnet links offer several advantages over the conventional use of .torrent files. The users can easily share a magnet link via email or, message instead of sharing a link to a .torrent file on a server. Additionally, the user has a higher chance of downloading a file even when a tracker is not available.
While the use of magnet link saves some infrastructural space on the server at the host side, it is also more convenient for the user as, all one has to do is, simply click on the magnet link to start the downloading process which ultimately saves the downloading time.
However, users have found trouble using the magnet links in Browser like Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Firefox. In this article, we explain how to use the magnet link in any browser.
NOTE: Torrents may be legal or illegal. Some sites offer only legitimate content whose copyright they hold or things that are in the public domain. You should check with the law of your land to see what you are downloading is legal.
How to open Magnet Links in Chrome Browser
Open the Google Chrome browser and Navigate to Settings. Go to Advanced and click on Privacy and Security.
Click on Content Settings and click on Handlers.
Toggle the button to “Allow sites to ask to become default handlers for protocols(recommended)”.
Now go to the torrent site and click on magnet link to download the file.
How to open Magnet Links in Microsoft Edge browser
Press Windows key +R to open Run. Type regedit and click on Ok
Navigate to the following path:
Set Magnet Link Default
Click on Default key at the right side of the window pane and change the value to:
Click OK to apply changes.
Once done, the browser must be able to open magnet links with your torrent client.
Magnet Links Downloads
How to open Magnet Links in Firefox Browser
Open Firefox browser and type about:config on the address bar. Type handler.expose.
How To Open Magnet Links With Vuze
Right-click and choose New from the drop-down menu.
Select Boolean from the drop-down menu.
Give the preference name network.protocol-handler.expose.magnet.
Set the value to false.
Now click on magnet link and choose Dialog and your torrent client in the Firefox Launch Application.
That’s all there is to it!
How To Download Magnet Links With Vuze
Read next: How to convert Magnet links to Direct Download links.
How To Download Magnet Links With Vuze
How To Associate Magnet Links With Vuze
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