How to Open and Play a Magnet Link on Windows, Mac, Linux

The quickest way to open any magnet link, on any system, is copy and paste. Right-click the link in your browser, choose to copy the link address, then paste it into your torrent app. Every BitTorrent client and streaming player accepts pasted magnet links, and you avoid all the default-app plumbing. The rest of this guide covers what the link actually is, how to make a click open it, how to play it straight away, and what to do when it will not budge.

What a magnet link is

A magnet link is a short piece of text that identifies a torrent by its fingerprint instead of pointing to a file on a server. Here is the start of the magnet link for Sintel, Blender's open movie (licensed CC BY 3.0), as listed on WebTorrent's free torrents page:

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:08ada5a7a6183aae1e09d831df6748d566095a10&dn=Sintel&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337

It has a few parts, defined in the BitTorrent specification BEP 9:

Part	Name	What it does
`xt=urn:btih:…`	Exact topic	The info hash: 40 hex characters that identify the torrent. The only required part.
`dn=`	Display name	A name your app can show while it waits.
`tr=`	Tracker	A server that lists peers. Optional, and there can be several.
`x.pe=`	Peer address	A specific peer to ask first. Optional and rare.

Newer torrents may use xt=urn:btmh: instead, which carries a version 2 info hash. Some links carry extra parameters too; the full Sintel link, for example, adds a web seed (ws=), a web server that holds the same file.

What happens when you open one

A magnet link does not contain the list of files, their sizes, or the hashes of each piece. That information, the torrent's metadata, has to come from other people. So your app:

Finds peers. It asks the trackers in the link, if there are any, and looks up the info hash in the DHT, a distributed table that BitTorrent clients share among themselves. BEP 9 says a client with no trackers should use the DHT.
Downloads the metadata from those peers. Peers that support the metadata extension send it in 16 KiB blocks.
Checks it. The app hashes the metadata it received and compares the result with the info hash in the link. If they match, nobody tampered with it.
Starts the normal download. From here, a magnet link behaves exactly like a .torrent file.

This is why a magnet link can sit on "downloading metadata" for a while: step 2 needs at least one peer that has the torrent. A .torrent file skips straight to step 4, because the metadata is already inside it.

How to open a magnet link in your app

Each app has its own place for this. A few examples:

qBittorrent: choose File → Add Torrent Link..., paste the link into the box (one link per line; magnet links, HTTP links, and bare info hashes all work), and confirm.
TorrentStream: paste the link into the search box, which also accepts magnet links and links to .torrent files.
WebTorrent in the browser (Instant.io): paste the link into the field labelled Download from a magnet link or info hash.

Make magnet links open when you click them

When you click a magnet link in a browser, the browser hands it to whichever app your operating system has registered for magnet: links. If nothing is registered, nothing happens. Installers often register the app as able to handle magnet links (qBittorrent's Windows installer does), but if you have several apps, or the setting got lost, you can choose yourself.

Windows 10 and 11

Open Settings → Apps → Default apps. A shortcut: press Windows+R, type ms-settings:defaultapps, and press Enter.
Under Set a default for a file type or link type, type magnet in the search box.
Select the magnet result and choose the app you want from the list.

If your app is missing from the list, it has not registered itself for magnet links. qBittorrent's options include a shortcut to the same page: Tools → Options → Behavior, under File association, there is a button labelled Open Windows Default Apps settings page.

macOS

On a Mac, you normally set this inside the torrent app:

qBittorrent: open its settings, go to Behavior, and under File association tick Use qBittorrent for magnet links.
Transmission: open its settings, go to the General pane, and next to Accept magnet links click Set Default Application.

For .torrent files, as opposed to links, macOS has its own method: select a .torrent file in the Finder, choose File → Get Info, open the Open with section, pick an app, and click Change All.

Linux

Most desktops follow the freedesktop.org standard, where a link type is a pseudo-MIME type called x-scheme-handler/magnet. Check the current handler from a terminal:

xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/magnet

Set a new one by naming the app's .desktop file:

xdg-mime default org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent.desktop x-scheme-handler/magnet

The file name varies by app and by how you installed it; look in /usr/share/applications or ~/.local/share/applications for the right one. The app's .desktop file must list x-scheme-handler/magnet in its MimeType line (qBittorrent's does). Run the command as your normal user, not with sudo. xdg-settings set default-url-scheme-handler magnet <app>.desktop does the same job.

In the browser

Browsers add one more step. Chrome, Edge, and other Chromium-based browsers ask for confirmation before handing a link to an outside app, and the prompt can include a checkbox to always allow that site to open links of this type. Firefox keeps the choice in its settings: open Settings, find the Applications section (typing magnet in the settings search box gets you there), and set the Action for magnet links to Always ask, your system's default application, or Use other… to pick an app.

How to play a magnet link instead of downloading it all

Opening a magnet link in a regular client downloads the whole torrent, in no particular order, before you can watch anything. To start watching within seconds, you have three options, each covered step by step in how to stream a torrent without downloading it first:

A streaming player. TorrentStream fetches the part you are watching first and, when you skip, fetches that exact spot next. It is free, open source, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is also an early preview with unsigned installers, so your system will warn you on install, and its player cannot yet decode AC-3 or DTS audio, which some films use. It does not register itself as the system's magnet handler, so paste the link in. Magnet links currently use an embedded engine (librqbit) by default; Settings → Advanced → Engine switches them to TorrentStream's own engine, which was faster in its benchmarks.
A client with sequential download, plus VLC or mpv. In qBittorrent, tick Download in sequential order and Download first and last pieces first (in the add-torrent window or the torrent's right-click menu), wait for a few percent, then open the file in your player. Skipping ahead past the downloaded part will not work. Sequential download explained covers how this works and what it costs the swarm.
WebTorrent in a browser. Paste the link into Instant.io and play the file in the page. It can only connect to peers that support WebRTC, so many ordinary torrents find no peers there, and it fully supports only MP4-family files.

For Sintel, any of the three works. The torrent is a 129 MB MP4 with subtitle files, small enough to test with.

Troubleshooting

Nothing happens when you click a magnet link

No app is registered for magnet links, or the browser blocked the hand-off.

Copy the link and paste it into your app. If that works, the problem is only the default-app setting; fix it with the steps for your system above.
Check whether the browser showed a prompt you dismissed. In Firefox, look at the magnet entry under Applications; if it is set to an app you uninstalled, change it.
On Windows, if your app is not in the list for MAGNET, reinstall it or use its own setting (qBittorrent's button above).
On Linux, run the xdg-mime query command. If it prints nothing, or a .desktop file that no longer exists, set it again.

Stuck on "downloading metadata"

qBittorrent shows this status as Downloading metadata; other apps call it retrieving or fetching metadata. It means your app has not yet found a peer willing to send the torrent's metadata.

Give it a minute or two. DHT lookups for an uncommon torrent can take a while.
Check that the DHT is on. A magnet link with no tr= trackers depends on the DHT to find its first peers. In qBittorrent it is under Tools → Options → BitTorrent, labelled Enable DHT (decentralized network) to find more peers.
Look at your connection setup. A firewall, a VPN that blocks peer-to-peer traffic, or a proxy can stop both trackers and the DHT from answering. Some apps also turn the DHT off in protected modes; TorrentStream does this when it runs through a VPN, its built-in WireGuard tunnel, or a SOCKS5 proxy, so a magnet link without trackers has nothing to find peers with there.
Try the .torrent file instead. If the site offers one, it contains the metadata, so this step disappears.
Accept that the torrent may be dead. If nobody who has it is online, no setting will help.

Metadata arrives, but there are no peers or it will not start

Once the file list appears, the problem is the swarm or your connection, not the link.

Look at the seed and peer counts. Zero seeds and a handful of peers usually means the torrent is too old or too obscure; there is not much you can do but wait.
Check that your client's listening port is open and not blocked by a firewall or router, and that your VPN, if you use one, allows peer-to-peer traffic. Why a torrent is slow or stuck goes through each cause in order.

The link opens in the wrong app

Two apps both registered themselves, and the wrong one won. Set the default again using the steps for your system. On a Mac, use the setting in the app you do want, so it takes the link type back.

Is it safe to open a magnet link?

The link itself is plain text and cannot run anything. What it downloads can. A video torrent should contain video files and perhaps subtitles; if it contains a .exe, .scr, or .lnk file, or an archive with a password, delete it. And while a magnet link is downloading, your IP address is visible to everyone in the swarm. That is fine for open movies, Linux ISOs, and public-domain films; for copyrighted material shared without permission it usually is not. Is torrenting legal? explains the general principles; it is not legal advice.

Sources

Checked on 20 October 2026.