Intended DDC/CI Power State feature behaviour is unclear.

[arpaterson]

After setting 'Turn off displays action' to *Hardware signal DDC/CI only':**

I can power off my monitor using a hotkey, or the twinkle tray icon 'Turn off displays' - bottom right of slide out menu, or the my specific monitor 'Power Off' - top right of slide out menu.

But I cannot turn it back on. I have to use the button on the monitor to turn it on, and it doesn't always resume display. Is this the intended behaviour? The monitor is OFF, and not in standby (standby led not lit)

If I select Software signal (default):

'Power Off' - top right of slide out menu, does not do anything. 'Turn off displays' - bottom right of slide out menu, makes the monitor first show "No Signal" and then go into standby. The hotkey does as 'Turn off displays does'. The monitor resumes on some mouse movement.

My suggestions are

• that the Power off button should do something, even in software only mode.
• allow setting a power state hotkey per monitor, not just for all displays together.
• Are there any monitors that can power ON from the OFF (not standby) state via DDC? If not, what is the use-case for this feature?
• Are these not better handled by Windows? eg. for security reasons (lock pc, turning on screensaver/powering off monitor)

[xanderfrangos]

Hi @arpaterson,

Thanks for the feedback! Regarding your suggestions:

• The "Power off" button not working is actually a bug that I've resolved with v1.14.4. It wasn't working if you turned on the "Power State" DDC/CI feature, but no others (ex. Contrast). That feature is the intended way to turn off individual displays via DDC/CI.
• I do intend to add more hotkey options, but not in the near future.
• Some monitors can power on from DDC/CI off. However, if I add a "Power on" option and it doesn't work, people will report it as a bug.
• I'm not sure what you're asking about regarding it being "better handled by Windows".

Additionally, I would like to mention that the DDC/CI "power off" functionality does act weirdly for some monitors (ex. not turning back on without sending another DDC/CI signal). I don't have it turned on by default for that reason. This is purely down to how the manufacturer decided to handle that VCP code. The manufacturer chose to enable support for it. Any DDC/CI software will do the exact same thing to your monitor.

[arpaterson]

OK, yeah I figured this was down to non-standard implementations.

Regarding windows - I meant is the windows lock key or a screen saver hotkey about as effective / more secure.

[Extremity]

Would you consider an advanced option of some sort to toggle the "Power On" functionality with whatever warning you deem sufficient? I love using this, but it defeats the purpose if I can Power Off each monitor from the task bar but have to physically go press the button on each one to turn them back on. Can't really know if it would or wouldn't work for certain monitors if the option isn't there, right?

Hell, even a special flag we have to provide when launching the exe to enable this option would be better than nothing. Please?

Edit: I'm also a bit confused by the wording in-app. It specified that the software-power setting displays a black screen until input occurs on said monitor, but both software and hardware do the same thing on my externals - they turn off (like, the power indicator LED turns off, it's identical to if I'd pressed the button) and won't turn back on until I manually press the power button on the monitor(s).

This isn't what this comment is for but I didn't really want to make a new post for it - an option to literally just show a black screen (like, a fullscreen window in all black) would be a nice middleground and would certainly be easy to have toggle on/off options for. Basically, I just really want to be able to turn things back on, even if it's a "fake" off state.

[xanderfrangos]

@Extremity Toggling back on will be available in v1.16.0, which is in beta right now. Some of the functionality discussed in this issue (like using hotkeys to control power state) are also included.

Regarding the "software" and "hardware" options doing the same thing: then that's simply how how your specific monitors behave. For most users, the displays will all wake up when using their mouse/keyboard. The "software" option is identical to the "turn off my screen after X minutes" option in Windows. It manually triggers it.

[takanuva15]

@Extremity I really needed a "Power on" button in the tray too since I also don't want to bend forward and click the power buttons on my monitor either. I poked around the Twinkle Tray code and finally added a quick-and-dirty "Power on" button to Twinkle Tray v1.15.4 that works to turn my monitors back on after clicking the "Power off" button:

Obviously this'll be dead code once v1.16 becomes GA, but for 2 nights of learning the repo and then coding, I'd say it came out nicely! You can download and install it directly from my fork under the "v1.15.5-poweron" release, and if you want to verify what code changes I made, you can check the full diff here.