Hi,

I've been working on an XML file format called Metalink for storing Mirror &
p2p locations for easy/automatic segmented downloads. A few download
managers support it now, with a few more on the way. No unix clients, which
is too bad because I designed it w/ open source projects in mind. It's
really handy for stuff like CD/DVD ISOs.

A .metalink file looks like this:

 <metalink version="3.0" xmlns="http://www.metalinker.org/">
   <files>
     <file name="example.ext">
     <verification>
       <hash type="md5">example-md5-hash</hash>
       <hash type="sha1">example-sha1-hash</hash>
     </verification>
     <resources>
       <url type="ftp">ftp://ftp.example.com/example.ext</url>
       <url type="http">http://www.example2.com/example.ext</url>
       <url type="bittorrent>http://www.ex.com/example.ext.torrent</url>
       <url type="magnet"/>
       <url type="ed2k"/>
     </resources>
     </file>
 </files>
 </metalink>

(There would usually be a bunch of ftp & http sources listed. There's also
language/OS information in files, so a .metalink for OpenOffice.org lists
all the language & Oses, & the client would download the file for your
language/OS if available).

Programs that don't support p2p would just use the multiple ftp/http URLs
listed, get segments from each in parallel, then run md5sum or sha1sum
against the finished download & compare checksums. You can see a video
capture of it working at http://www.metalinker.org/implementation.html

I emailed Daniel Stenberg about this & he said:

"curl currently has no XML parser or anything... Probably it would be
easiest to start with writing a separate command line tool for this that
uses libcurl for the transfers with each individual server. Using the multi
interface, it will also be easy to do it still using a single thread."

If anyone would be interested in working on this project, please contact me.
I'd be happy to sponsor development financially.

Current clients that support Metalink
FlashGot http://www.flashgot.net/
GetRight http://www.getright.com/beta6.html

thanks!
ant
http://www.metalinker.org/
Received on 2006-05-07