up vote 0 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

I wish to modify a laptop monitor driver to add more brightness levels and calibrate the levels to be linear. How should i go about doing this?

link|improve this question
33% accept rate
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

This is core system driver in Windows 7 and will likely not be easy or possible to modify. If you do attempt to undertake this task, you should be familiar with C and probably Assembly as well. This is a good place to start reading about the Windows 7 WDDM Driver in relation to brightness levels.

link|improve this answer
Looking at the link you provided, it would seem that the laptop in question does indeed use fading transitions. This implies that the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface does have access to more brightness levels than is mapped to the windows brightness slider. If this is so, would writing a small app to interface with WMI allow for more brighness levels without having to reverse engineer any drivers? – aCuria Oct 26 '10 at 10:02
Fading Transitions - the platform could change the display brightness to each intermediate brightness level (35, 40, 45, … 85, 90, and 95 percent), pausing at each intermediate brightness level for a very short amount of time, such as 20 milliseconds (ms). The result is a smooth transition in display brightness that is less jarring to the user – aCuria Oct 26 '10 at 10:13
1  
WMI is a much better approach, see here for the way to do it: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394549.aspx. However, you may find this code enlightening as well: mycomponent.blogspot.com/2009/05/… – MaQleod Oct 26 '10 at 10:27
feedback
up vote 2 down vote

you cannot simply modify it..

Unless you have a working open source driver for your card (which I doubt), in that case read the code and learn how to program at the driver level.

If you are very brave and talented, you can write the driver from scratch. In that case, I suggest reading code from the linux drivers and try porting it to Windows.

link|improve this answer
Why does the video card driver come into the picture? – aCuria Oct 26 '10 at 9:55
1  
hm sorry I kinda misread it; anyway, if you replace 'video card' with 'monitor' in the above it's still my answer ;P On the other hand, things like calibrating color etc can be done by the videocard driver, no? – stijn Oct 26 '10 at 10:10
Issue is that brightness levels are broken. ~40% drop in brightness over 1 of the transitions – aCuria Oct 26 '10 at 10:14
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.