Comparison with ddccontrol

The program ddccontrol appears to be unmaintained, and has been dropped from distributions. It is brittle in ways that I surmise reflect the services availble at the time it was written. In particular:

• ddcctontrol, as it is normally built (based on configure options that control conditional compilation), programs the I2C devcies directly at the PCI level. It has dedicated code for each of several video card interfaces (e.g. nvidia, sis, intel740, intell 810). ddcutil, on the other hand, relies exclusively on the the i2c-dev userspace interface to I2C. This should make it less fragile to video card variations.
• ddccontrol uses a monitor attribute database to interpret VCP feature codes. With MCCS 2.0 and greater, VCP feature code definitions are largely standardized. ddcutil uses the MCCS specification to interpret VCP feature values, and considerable effort has gone into understanding that specification, particularly the variation among versions. Unlike ddccontrol, ddcutil makes no attempt to interpret values for feature codes designated as manufacturer specific (E0..FF).