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MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

github.com

21–30 of 89 posts

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#21
post #6

I love this thing. It only seems to work over DisplayPort cables for me. HDMI doesn't work. I'm using a MBP mid-2014. Saved me from buying a new monitor or something silly like getting an iMac. Seriously weird why they don't just support DDD/CI natively.

It does work over USB-C on 2019/2020s

That's good to hear. If/when I get forced into a new MBP I can look forward to that working at least.

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#22

did they disable this in OS X? Used to work fine for me, but I gave up buying $2,500 iPads after the keyboard debacle and ensuing 1984 treatment

DDC was afaik never officially supported, and whatever they did with the connection path means that there's enough reports of "crash whole OS trying to change brightness of display"

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#23
post #13
post #8

Great codebase. I stumbled on this while trying to figure out how to programmatically control screen brightness in a macOS app. Turns out that this is far more difficult than imagined. Even controlling just the built-in screen, something I assumed would be included in Apple's libraries, was not included. The source code in MonitorControl is very well written and commented and helped me catch the mistakes I was doing…

Doing anything on macOS is more difficult than I imagine it to be. For example, writing an alt-tab-type app, enumerating the list of apps and their windows. Good luck.

I really would love something like rofi for macos

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#25
Oh wow great, I hope this works for me too! I have an LG 4K screen and the LG tool to change brightness and contrast is really terrible, it has some stupid built-in fake Picture in Picture mode which is constantly flashing red borders around the screen when you use it. And the UI is really bad and slow.

This little menubar control looks like just what I wanted.

Edit: Yes it works great! On my LG24UD58. Perfect! Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work with my Eizo L568 but that's ancient. And I think it had some special USB-based control method. But really glad to be able to get rid of the LG software now.

PS: You have to enable the contrast with a tickbox, otherwise that slider is not shown.

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#27
Worked over VGA with my DELL monitor and MacBook Air (both from 2012). Where has this been all my life!

I didn't even know it was a thing and thought there was a special chip in the Apple screens to be able to control your screen from your computer.

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#28
I have often wondered if you could exploit a monitor over the DDC bus sending i2c commands. There have just got to be memory corruption bugs in the display controller code.

They probably also typically have some flash memory, so perhaps one could permanently reprogram a monitor after the exploit?

Re: MonitorControl: Control external monitor brightness and volume on your Mac

#30
post #23
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing anything on macOS is more difficult than I imagine it to be. For example, writing an alt-tab-type app, enumerating the list of apps and their windows. Good luck.

I really would love something like rofi for macos

I think a combination of Alfred and Hammerspoon could get you most of the way there?
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