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[greengeek]

Mike Walsh's thread here got me thinking more deeply about how video output devices (eg screens) can have their intensity (brightness/contrast etc) controlled.

MochiMoppel pointed out in that thread that xrandr can interface more than one screen - eg internal laptop screen as well as external HDMI or VGA screen etc.

I want to offer some thoughts and utilities for best adjusting screen intensity.

As far as i know there are 3 ways to control screen intensity:
1) Backlight intensity (how much light the white fluoro or LED lights provide to illuminate the screen from behind)
2) Pixel intensity (You can have a bright red pixel or a dim red pixel)
3) Pixel balance (you can vary the relative intensity of each red green or blue pixel to change the appearance of your screen)

I would like to see a complete gtk gui utility that allows each of these characteristics to be adjusted for multiple screens, and also offers information to the user concerning what devices are connected, what parameters are supported and what methods are available for controlling the brightness.

(It would be nice to bring together in one gui a suite of utilities that can handle different hardware in a straightforward manner)

I'm not a good programmer so I am hoping others will assist too

In my first attempt at this gui I have included a feature that tells the user what their currently connected video device is (eg: LVDS1, VGA etc...) and allows choice of BACKLIGHT intensity.

This will only work for devices that support the Backlight or BACKLIGHT property in xrandr.

Devices NOT supporting those properties will need to use the utilities offered in Mike's thread noted above.

Save the gui somewhere, remove the fake .gz suffix, make excutable and run it.

What the gui does:
- Identifies the currently connected output screen (as seen by xrandr)
- Queries the maximum allowable "backlight" brightness parameter for that device (EDIT: "backlight" and "brightness" are two separate parameters. I hope to include MochiMoppel's script to adjust pixel brightness also)
- Allows the user to choose which output device they are trying to adjust
- Allows the user to choose what backlight brightness they want to set
- Uses xrandr to set the new backlight brightness parameter to the selected device.

Problems
- Not all devices support the Backlight or BACKLIGHT parameters
- I suspect that not all systems have only ONE device seen by xrandr as "connected". I need help to handle multiple types of connected device
- The list of output devices available in the gui has been made on the basis of what i see on my system but I really want to populate that list from the user's own system xrandr output.
(I need better gtk skills )

ToDo:
- Find way to populate "output screen" chooser from the xrandr output specific to each users machine
- Identify within gui when multiple connected screens are available
- Display info within gui for parameters of currently connected outputs
- include Mike's SCT slider (for quick switching between Night/Day etc)
- include Mochi's handling of multiple screens and pixel intensity slider
- include something like xgamma pixel colour balance (in slider or wheel form?)
- If possible I would like to do all these things using the built in tools of Slacko 5.6 but maybe that won't be possible. I will see how far I can get


Prerequisites and comments:

Use the following syntax if you want to find out what your system sees as available (connected or disconnected) devices:

[greengeek]

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