Opening Magnet links on Windows 8.1

Opening Magnet links in Chrome or Opera on a clean Windows 8.1 install… no sugar

So I tried opening magnet links in Chrome and Opera on a Windows 8.1 machine… but that did not work. Actually, a click did absolutory nothing, even with Transmission Remote GUI (4.1) installed. I walked two paths in trying to solve this. The second one did the trick so don’t start executing the steps right away 😉

What is the default program to open :magnet in Windows?

Google did not help me out, and :magnet was not in de Windows default protocol list.

Will IE 11 help us out?

I figured IE 8.1 be more cooperative so I opened a magnet link in IE 11 and that gave a popup and the option to search in the Windows Store for a program to open the link. I selected metroTransmission in the hope this would add :magnet to the protocol list and it did.

I then went to the protocol settings again by pointing to the upper-right corner of the screen, moving the mouse pointer down, and clicking Settings, and then Change PC settings, Search and apps, click Defaults, then Choose default apps by protocol and I was able to click on metroTransmission but I could only select other apps from the store.

Trying something else: hacking the registry … again

I decided to check the registry (press your windows key and type regedit) and in previous versions of Windows you could find the command here: HKEYCLASSESROOT\Magnet\shell\open\command

But in windows 8.1 the registry for Magnet only goes as “deep” as HKEYCLASSESROOT\Magnet

I manually added the new keys, shell, open and command and entered the value:

“C:\Program Files (x86)\Transmission Remote GUI\transgui.exe” “%L”
Yes with the “quotes” 😉

Yeah it works 🙂

After adding the registry value, Opera does open the links and asks me if Transmission Remote GUI will be the default application to open these links. I’m pretty sure I could have skipped the “protocol” step and adding it to the registry only is enough, but I would love for you to confirm this for me 🙂 I can say that url:magnet is gone from the protocol list again.

Cheers, Mark