Detecting when Picture by Picture is enabled on my monitor?

I should start by saying I’m running Arch by the way Debian.

I have an AOC AG493UCX ultrawide monitor. It’s resolution is 5120x1440. It has a Picture by Picture (PBP) mode that lets you display two separate inputs side by side. Which can be really useful for certain tasks but it has a rather annoying issue with usability.

When I enable PBP, it doesn’t change the ouptut resolution of my main computer but rather displays the 5120x1440 output of my computer, on half of the screen, with large black bars at the top and bottom. I then have to manually change the resolution to 1440p so it displays correctly. It’s not too arduous of a task, as I’ve written a shell script that toggles the display resolution between 5120x1440 and 2560x1440, depending on what resolution the script detects when it is run. I’ve also created a .desktop shortcut that I’ve pinned to my KDE Task Manager but I’d like the whole process to be automatic.

I’m trying to figure out whether it’s possible for my Linux / Debian system, to detect when I enable PBP on the monitor. The monitor is connected to my computer via a DisplayPort cable, and there’s also a USB passthrough cable going from the monitor to my computer, so that I can use the USB ports on the monitor itself.

The monitor has a few Windows apps that let you change the monitor’s settings but as far as I can tell after reading through AOC’s sparse, crappy documentation, and looking at various screenshots and videos, you can’t turn PBP on or off via the software they offer.

Has anyone got any ideas of what I should try?

I’ve been doing some more digging and unfortunately, I haven’t had any luck RE: detecting PBP being toggled. I did solve one other issue though.

On the AG493UCX, when you toggle PBP mode, for some reason it changes the colour mode setting back to the ugly default “Warm” setting. Whilst trying to find a solution to my original problem using ddcutil, I found out that you can change the color mode, which is fantastic new for me as I have calibrated my monitor. So it goes from looking just right, to total crap when the “Warm” setting is selected.

I’m away from my computer at the moment but I’ll post the command when I get a chance.

Just going back to PBP for a moment… I checked through everything I could think of in ddcutil (short of just issuing setvcp commands for undocumented features) and I couldn’t find anything related to PBP.

I also spent way to much time looking into the possibility of some kind of automated screenshoting tool combined with some kind of image recognition application… then I realized that the OSD menu doesn’t show up in screenshots… if only manufacturers just made their software Linux compatible!!!