DDC/CI Monitor Control

DDC/CI is an [i2c]¹ protocol for controlling your monitors' brightness, contrast, color, and input selection.

It’s good to understand DDC because Desktops running Windows/MacOS/etc. will not support changing brightness for your monitor by default which makes for an annoying (possibly painful) experience by working in a dark/bright room and a monitor that isn’t configured correctly.

It’s also useful for dual computer setups sharing a keyboard/mouse/monitor, because it can be used to tell the monitor to switch inputs without requiring touching the monitor. Some have created custom apps which monitor the USB devices connected via a USB switch and telling DDC to switch to the correct input.

@haimgel on GitHub describes how he wrote two programs, one for mac and one for windows, which watches for his USB Switch and uses DDC/CI to switch the inputs as needed: https://haim.dev/posts/2020-07-28-dual-monitor-kvm/ [github]

Windows

To control your monitor install Monitorian in the Windows Store. Also checkout the github repo: github.com/emoacht/Monitorian.

MacOS

To control your monitor install Monitor Control via brew: brew install --cask monitorcontrol or checkout the github repo: github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

The app used to be very basic and sometimes buggy, but a lot of work has been put in to it recently. It looks very professional and works perfectly for me.

Note: You’ll want to make sure you’re directly connected to a monitor with DDC/CI enabled. Connecting via docks or switches (HDMI switch or etc) will interfere with actually communicating the DDC/CI commands in my experience.

Linux

You have several options in Linux and they all start with making sure the i2c-dev kernel module is enabled so apps can talk to your monitor. You may also want to update udev rules to allow users of a certain group to access specific i2c devices without sudo.

There is ddccontrol but it appears unmaintained and the supposedly correct tool to use is ddcutil. There are extensions for Gnome 3 to control ddcutil from the system tray, but you could also just create some bash scripts/functions as well to set things via the terminal.

NixOS

To install in NixOS add ddcutil, ddcui, and gnomeExtensions.brightness-control-using-ddcutil to your system packages.

Then also configure udev rules for the ddc group to use it without sudo

services.udev.extraRules = ''KERNEL=="i2c-[0-9]*", GROUP="ddc", MODE="0660", PROGRAM="${pkgs.ddcutil}/bin/ddcutil --bus=%n getvcp 0x10"'';

Make sure to create a ddc group and add it to the users you want to control the monitor brightness. For example:

  users.groups.ddc = { };
  # Define a user account. Don't forget to set a password with ‘passwd’.
  users.users.cmp = {
    isNormalUser = true;
    extraGroups = [ "wheel" "networkmanager" "ddc" ];
  };