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]]> By: Mike Linksvayer http://virtualturntable.fourstones.net/blogtorrent-update#comment-318 Mike Linksvayer Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.fourstones.net/virtualturntable/?p=270#comment-318 Magnet links and BitTorrent can be used similarly. The former is far more flexible, the latter just does swarming download, really well. Even if you didn’t know, you could guess which one was more popular. :-)

Magnet links can be used to drive a poor swarming download if one (or more) regular http source is given for the ‘xs’ (exact substitute) parameter (a hash is usually given as the ‘xt’ or exact topic value) — poor because the http source is dumb — it doesn’t know anything about the swarm. Or they can be used to drive a decent swarming download, if the http source is a gnutella client, which will track and propagate ‘alt-sources’, i.e., participants in the swarm.

The way Magnet links are used so far are as an adjunct to filesharing (mainly with gnutella clients and kazaa), with the main benefit to publishers being seeding those networks. The main benefit for publishers using BitTorrent is reducting bandwidth costs.

BTW a probably slightly cleaned up version of the bitcollider PHP wrapper code[1] used on ccmixter.org and my attempted explanation of how BT differs from and mostly works better than stereotypical filesharing[2].

[1] http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2005/03/05/bitcollider-php/
[2] http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2004/12/30/deployment-matters/

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