Can I control brightness on second monitor?

Question

I have a thinkpad (x301) with an external monitor connected via a DisplayPort to HDMI cable. I can control the brightness of the laptop monitor using the keys on the laptop, but I can't work out how to control the brightness of the external monitor.

$ ls /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness
/sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/brightness
11
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/acpi_video0/max_brightness
15
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
501804
$ cat /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness
2414340

I can write values into the above and both intel_backlight and acpi_video0 changes the brightness of the laptop monitor.

Does the above mean that there is no way to change the brightness of the external monitor (other than the OSD)?

Answer 1

ADditional info: I'm using CRT monitor. – Neilvert Noval Mar 11 '11 at 17:06It seems that it is not possible to control external monitors using the /sys/class/backlight. But there exists an application called ddccontrol which can control the brightness of your external monitor.

Instructions on how to use the command line interface are available here.

Basically you need to probe for available monitors and controls using ddccontrol -p and look for the address of the control you want in the output and then set the value using ddccontrol -p -r 0x10 -w 70.