High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Metalink is a cross-platform and cross-application Internet standard/framework/file format for programs that download, including download managers, BitTorrent clients, Web browsers, FTP clients, and P2P programs. For increased convenience, the multiple download locations for a file (FTP/HTTP/P2P) and other metadata in HTTP header fields and/or an XML file with the extension .meta4 or .metalink. The duplicate download locations provide reliability in case one method fails. Some clients also achieve faster download speeds by allowing different chunks/segments of each file to be downloaded from multiple resources at the same time (segmented downloading).