Orbit Downloader - Forums

Hi everyone,
Like many people I have a requirement to initiate and shut down the Orbit program at a particular time of day.

I tried two "graceful" approaches initially - and both of them seem to have bugs in the current Orbit implementation.

Option 1:  Use the Orbit Scheduler
I tried setting the Orbit Scheduler to stop downloads at 16.00 every day, but it does not work.  I see from the forums that I'm not alone here.  Ideally I would like to stop all downloads at 16.00 and resume all downloads at 00.00 (midnight).  This is to prevent annoying the other people in my house who use the Internet in the evening.

Option 2: Use Orbit's command line options coupled with Windows Scheduled Tasks

I have used this approach successfully with eMule.

In theory Orbit is supposed to support a number of command line switches.  So I created a file, "endorbit.bat", which contains:

orbitdm.exe -stopall
orbitdm.exe -exit

I then schedule the batch file to run at 15.59 using Windows Scheduled Tasks.

The task runs, but Orbit seems to see the switches as URLs for download.  Frankly I don't think anyone actually tested the command line switches at all.


So I have a suggestion for a workaround:

TO START ORBIT: Use Windows Scheduled Tasks.  On the Orbit "Preferences" tab make sure you check "Automatically resume unfinished tasks on startup".

TO CLOSE ORBIT: Create a batch file called "endorbit.bat" using Notepad.

The batchfile contains the following line:

taskkill /F /IM orbitdm.exe

Use Windows Scheduled Tasks to run the endorbit batch file at the time you require.

Note 1:  I realise I could invoke taskkill directly from Windows Scheduled Tasks.  But by using the batch file, if there's ever a version of Orbit with working command line switches I only need to edit the batch file - I can leave my scheduled task the way it is.

Note 2:  I also realise I could create a recurring taskkill process using a command such as "at 02:30PM /every: taskkill /F /IM orbitdm.exe" .  But I think that taskkill process is held in memory, and would not survive a reboot (please correct me if I'm mistaken).

Note 3: taskkill is a "blunt instrument".  It does not close Orbit gracefully, it literally kills the task (as the name suggests).  One side effect is that I see additional file copies, such as "filename(1).rar" created in the downloads folder when Orbit restarts.  But it doesn't seem to corrupt these files (this statement is based on downloading multi-part RAR files).

My advice is to try it on a couple of small downloads and see if it works for you.

So while it's not pretty, at least it seems to work for me - unlike Orbit Scheduler and Orbit command line switches!!!

Cheers,
Geoff