Hi,

I wrote about metalink a few months ago. It's an XML file that lists
Mirrors, p2p, checksums, & other info for download managers.

I was looking for someone to write a front end for cURL or wget, but with
the help of Alexander Lazic (who found it) and its author Tatsuhiro
Tsujikawa, aria2 [ http://aria2.sourceforge.net/ ] now supports metalink.
aria2 is a unix command line download utility with resuming and segmented
downloading that also supports bittorrent.

GetRight on Windows and Speed Download on Mac also support metalink.

OpenOffice uses metalinks to distribute their free office suite [
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/magnet.html ].

Metalinks for other projects are available at http://metalink.packages.ro/

Here's what the metalinks look like:

 <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.example1.com/example.ext</url>
       <url type="ftp">ftp://ftp.example2.com/example.ext</url>
       <url type="http">http://www.example1.com/example.ext</url>
       <url type="http">http://www.example2.com/example.ext</url>
       <url type="http">http://www.example3.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>

I'd be interested in any comments.

ant
http://www.metalinker.org/
Received on 2006-07-26