get-edid (1)

get-edid [OPTIONS] | parse-edid

get-edid [OPTIONS] > filename

parse-edid < filename

The read-edid utility comprises two tools: get-edid and parse-edid.

get-edid uses real mode calls to perform Data Display Channel (DDC) transfers, or Linux i2c calls to perform Enhanced DDC transfers to retrieve information from monitors, including identification strings, supported sync ranges, available video modes, and video mode parameters. Such information can be useful for configuring X Window System servers in certain cases.

get-edid returns the raw Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) block directly from the monitor, so the parse-edid command is available to interpret it and generate a human-readable block of text information that can also be included in a X11 xorg.conf file.

Generally the output of get-edid is piped directly to parse-edid.

New in version 3.0.0, get-edid takes a few options.

-b BUS, --bus BUS

only scan the i2c bus BUS (if built with i2c support)

-c, --classiconly

only use the older VBE interface (if built with i2c and VBE support)

-h, --help

display a basic help message

-i, --i2conly

only use the newer i2c interface (if built with i2c and VBE support)

-m NUM, --monitor NUM

try to return information about monitor number NUM (VBE only)

-q, --quiet

do not output messages over stderr

parse-edid still does not take any options. --help will show you which options your build of read-edid supports.

read-edid is originally the work of John Fremlin and others. Since 1.4.2, the new maintainer and programmer has been Matthew Kern. Nearly all of the code for this project, as well as this manual page, has been rewritten for 3.0.0 by Matthew Kern. See AUTHORS for more details.

Matthew Kern's read-edid website at <http://polypux.org/projects/read-edid>