U3014, shortcut to quickly switch inputs?

mj2014,

I have never seen one.

Swamped207, thanks very much for that suggestion.  I'll definitely try that out and reply with results.

swamped207, I have one more computer on which I need to test your solution, but so far it is working perfectly for me :)   By configuring a shortcut, I made the process even easier.  Thanks very much!

BTW, I did some Google'ing to try and find some documentation which defined the supported arguments for ddm.exe, but I couldn't find any.  I could only find the generic user's guide.  Do you know where I can find such information?  Note that I also tried to see if there was any "usage" information output if ddm.exe was launched from a command prompt window with bogus options, but I was not successful in that endeavor: Nothing was output to the command  prompt window.

Thanks again :)

swamped207, Your solution works perfectly.  Many thanks.

This worked for me on my home PC, but I can't get Dell Display Manager working on my laptop. It's connected via an ePortPlus 2 - Pro2x docking station where both hdmi ports are connected to the mini-display ports on the monitors.

Dell Display Manager tells me it can't detect the monitors, although they work fine in all other regards.

Any ideas?

Not one you will like - I'm afraid the culprit is likely to be the docking station. To see if this is the case, connect the monitor directly to the laptop.

Is there by any chance another parameter to change the brightness up or down from what it is currently? Something like

ddm.exe /1:SetBrightness +5

I found another program called ScreenBright that lets you set a particular brightness level via the command line (and hence keyboard shortcut via batch file), but not change by a certain amount. It has a "-get" parameter, but it returns the value in a popup window and I can't see any way to get at this value programmatically.

Or you could do this:

ddm.exe /1:IncControl 10 Y

       --OR--

ddm.exe /1:DecControl 10 Y

This will increase or decrease Brightness respectively, by Y steps.

May not be exactly what you're looking for but:

ddm.exe /1:SetBrightnessLevel X

Sets brightness to X%, where X is a value between 0 and 100.

ghen - thanks very much for that: exactly what I needed. If you have any more information of what codes do what, please share! I'm sure someone will find it useful.

I found that the number Y above is in hexadecimal, so "10" is 16, and "a" is 10, etc

Also, you can use multiple parameter sets to set multiple monitors at the same time.

I wanted to change both my monitors' brightness in 5% steps. First I tried batch (.bat) files for increasing and decreasing the brightness by 5, but these come up with a command window when you run it. To fix this, I used a .vbs file containing:

CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run """C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe"" /1:IncControl 10 5 /2:IncControl 10 5", 0, False

and the equivalent for "DecControl". Then to get Windows to allow you to run these from a keyboard shortcut, you need to create a shortcut, place this shortcut either in the Start Menu or on the Desktop, and edit the shortcut Properties -> Shortcut tab -> Shortcut key, which must be a CTRL + ALT or CTRL + SHIFT combination.

This worked, but I found getting the shortcut to work unreliable, and sometimes it took 5 seconds for each press to register - which makes stepping through brightnesses unusable.

By far a better option seems to be to use AutoHotKey (Google it). After a few minutes reading the tutorial, I created a script that allows me to decrease / increase brightness 5 steps at a time, using CTRL + the numpad "/" and "*" keys. Just open Notepad and copy the following into a file that you save somewhere in your documents as "Screen brightness.ahk".

^NumpadMult::
    Run, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe" /1:IncControl 10 5 /2:IncControl 10 5
Return

^NumpadDiv::
    Run, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe" /1:DecControl 10 5 /2:DecControl 10 5
Return


Then copy a shortcut to this file into the Startup folder (probably "C:\Users\Your user name\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"), and it will run at startup. Notice AHK lets you assign any key combo you want.

Clearly if you want increments other than 5%, or have fewer or more monitors, edit the .ahk file as appropriate.

DDM command-line parameters are designed to be leveraged by native Windows shortcuts, which allow you to specify a complex command-line and assign a system-wide hotkey. So instead of using another program like AHK to do this, you could just create two shortcuts - one to increase and one to decrease brightness - and assign them the hotkey of your choice. The shortcut command-line, instead of linking to a batch file or vbs script,  would simply be:

(to increase)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe /1:IncControl 10 5 /2:IncControl 10 5

(to decrease)

C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe /1:DecControl 10 5 /2:DecControl 10 5

See the release notes/readme included with recent releases of DDM for more info.

Thanks swamped. Now you point it out, it's clear that there's no point messing around with .bat or .vbs scripts, when you can just put the same line directly in a Windows shortcut. Also thanks for pointing me towards the "readme.txt" that is located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\", and contains the parameters like "IncControl" etc.

From there I could google "MCCS standard", which gave me a pdf document containing relevant codes. It seems the "10" above is for "Luminance". I'd have thought 13h, "Backlight Control" would be the one to change, but it didn't do anything when I tried it, so it seems not!

Like I mentioned above, the Windows shortcuts seemed to be very slow for me, taking 5 seconds or so to detect the keystroke. I'm not sure if this is caused by conflict with some other software I'm running, or a Windows 10 bug. But AHK has solved this problem, and also doesn't require 2 of CTRL/SHIFT/ALT, or shortcuts sitting on the desktop. If I just needed to set a particular level, rather than adjusting the level gradually and judging what feels comfortable, then the slow response time wouldn't be a problem. I do find myself wanting to change the brightness several times per day, depending on ambient light levels / sunlight.

Windows 10:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\Dell Display Manager\ddm.exe" /1:IncControl 10 10 /2:IncControl 10 10

...\Dell\Dell Display Manager\readme.txt
IncControl X Y - increases the value of control X by Y
(I didn't know that '10' = 'BrightnessLevel')

It's working great and it's good to have functions on DESKTOP like in LAPTOPS - thank You.

Hi swamped

This will probably sound really stupid but I've never really used the command prompt. Can you give me a list of steps I need to take to set a hotkey for changing inputs on my monitor? I would REALLY appreciate it! Thanks!