Browser support for embedded magnet links

[jefft0]

Hello. I have a web page with magnet links to images and I want the browser to load and display them embedded in the web page. When I register Shareaza as a magnet handler, the image is loaded in Shareaza. But how can I get the browser to fetch the magnet-linked image and treat it as if it downloaded it directly so that it displays in the web page?

Thanks,
- Jeff

[ailurophobe]

Not sure what you actually want here. Generally "embedding" and downloading are two different things and to embed something you either need a plug-in that supports embedding instead of downloading or the link and file type needs to be directly supported by the browser. Which is not the case with magnet links for any browser I have heard of.

The easiest way to get what I am randomly guessing you might want would be to create lower resolution thumbnails of the images, use those on the web page and wrap them in anchor tags for the magnet links, so that when the thumbnail is clicked the much bigger full resolution image is downloaded. P2P links are generally not suited for embedding in web pages because there is no guarantee of the latency being reasonable. (And if it is not P2P, you don't need to use a magnet link.)

[jefft0]

[cyko_01]

Web browsers are not capable of doing what you are describing because they do not support the G2 protocol, only http, https, etc. Something that might serve your purposes is shareaza collections. Shareaza collections are basically web pages, packaged like a zip file, that you download from a person(or multiple people if the collection is popular) over the G2 network. They can contain html, text, css, javascript, embedded images and even magnet/ed2k links.

[jefft0]

Thanks for suggesting Shareaza collections, but I don't see how to do deep linking with a collection. I've tried reading the documentation on the Shareaza HTTP interface but can't figure out if it can serve the data as I want.

For example can Shareaza running on localhost respond to something like "http://localhost:8080/magnet/xt=sha1:TT467I63U4EA6CYGP2MDRHQ3Z3VZGVSI" by returning the file with the given hash? Which forum has the experts who know the Shareaza HTTP interface innards?

Thanks again,
- Jeff

[ailurophobe]

Collections or a zip archive. You can compress all the files of the web site into a ZIP file, share the file, and then distribute the magnet link to the file. People would then download and share the file. To view you would just open the archive (most OS understand ZIP natively), double-click on the HTML file inside (better package things you do not want people to start with under sub-folders) and the site would open in the browser. Of course if anything on the site changed you' have to do everything from the beginning... But that is a limitation of hash based P2P links regardless of how you do it. If that is a problem (site is large and actively updated) collections would work better. I don't think they are designed to do exactly what you want, but a collection of all the files on the site would give a downloader a local copy of the site just like the ZIP method with the difference that it should (never have done anything with collection...) understand to only download files that are new or changed.

The ZIP method would have better performance, so use that if the site does not change or only changes incrementally. Like a journal, the latest issue does not include or change the previous issues, just a list of links to the previous issues. Include the date of release or a serial number in the filename of the archive and it will work just fine with Shareaza search. So you'd have something like "<descriptive name>.<tag 1>.<tag 2>.<date>.zip". The <descriptive name> would be a name that would tell something about the topic of the site so people could stumble upon it on search. Tags would be constants like "compressed website", "456ertyU", or "jefft0". People doing a search could include one of them in the search along with the descriptive name and use the second as a filter. This would first cut down on false hits and second filter out random spam. Date should be obvious.

[jefft0]

Thank you for the considered response on the ZIP file option. This would work for some of my needs but I now understand that I may be asking about a new feature. I will post to the Features forum.

Thanks again,
- Jeff

[cyko_01]