With the advent of HDMI ports on TVs, and especially with the advent of copy protection for content sent over HDMI. The time required to start a video has increased to 10 seconds. As is usually the case, TVs invented a new quick-switch feature called InstaPort, developed by Silicon Image, to quickly switch HDMI inputs.
What is Instaport vs HDMI Quick Switch
InstaPort is a development of Silicon Image.
The HDMI Quick Switch is a Synopsys development.
So you may see in the description of Samsung TVs support for HDMI Quick Switch Samsung or support for InstaPort Samsung.
These two technologies are exactly the same, and the principle of their work is the same. For example, there are Lee jeans and Levis jeans, but they perform the same function.
Synopsys has developed a technology similar to HDMI Quick Switch. The purpose of these technologies is the same – to allow fast switching between HDMI inputs. The signal from the selected HDMI input appears on the TV screen after 5-10 seconds. This is the time it takes to establish a secure connection, which prevents video from being copied. Movie makers and video playback device manufacturers have agreed that streaming video will be transmitted in encrypted form, which will prevent the mass copying of movies. However, many people are annoyed by the long time it takes for video to appear on the TV screen when switching HDMI ports. This raises the question of whether everything works or if I’m just looking at a blank screen.
How the HDMI Quick Switch works
The way the HDMI quick switch works is that the TV has a special device (intermediate receiver) with additional HDCP chips through which the video signal passes, and only after the HDCP chip the video stream reaches the HDMI receiver. There are some televisions that do not have all ports that support HDCP, such televisions are labeled accordingly, such as HDMI2 HDCP, which means that the second HDMI port supports HDCP.
Now about how this works in practice. For example, one HDMI input on your TV is connected to a Blue Ray player and you are watching video from a media player such as Roku TV. When you switch between HDMI inputs, the picture on your TV appears very quickly. Each HDMI port has an HDCP chip, the device connected to the TV pre-initializes a secure connection between the devices. However, the signal from an unused HDMI port is not used, there may be no video, just the two devices exchanging secure connection protocols and ready to go. When switching video reception from one HDMI port to another, because the secure connection is already established, it takes about 1 second to switch between HDMI inputs. This is convenient for the user, the implementation of this HDMI port connection scheme does not cost a lot of money, it can be only about 5-10 dollars.
This is convenient, but so far manufacturers are trying to make such ports only top models of TVs. This is done on purpose, the top models should have as many advanced features as possible.
