How Photos Are Captured
Every photo capture starts with a playback event: the player tells CamGrabber that an ad has started on a frame, and CamGrabber grabs a stop-frame from the camera bound to that frame. What gets photographed and how often is decided by policies delivered from the CS Play server.
First shows of each ad
By default CamGrabber photographs the first shows of each advertisement — out of the box, the first 2 shows. With a paid license the count is configurable in the CS Play web interface (for example, the first 10 shows), per screen settings policy.
100% coverage for a campaign
With a paid license a campaign can be marked for 100% photo coverage in the web interface: every show of that campaign is photographed. Use it for campaigns where the advertiser requires complete photo evidence.
Daily re-shoot schedule
With a paid license you can set a daily photo report time. At the configured time the grabber’s capture counters reset, and it photographs everything again the configured number of times. This produces a fresh daily proof that the screen plays its content.
Programmatic shows
Programmatic (CS Context) shows are photographed on every show — this works even with the free license. The photo captures are forwarded to the SSP and further to DSPs as playback confirmation. The server keeps the programmatic capture archive for a configurable time.
Interactive creatives
An interactive (HTML) creative can play several different clips inside one ad. To photograph each of them, the creative requests captures itself through the player JS API events:
| Variable | Meaning |
|---|---|
|
Number of stop-frames to take. |
|
Interval between consecutive stop-frames. |
|
Delay before the first stop-frame. |
See Creating interactive ads for the player-side event mechanism.
Photo timestamp is capture time
Each photo capture is stamped with the moment it was taken. Photo captures uploaded later from the offline cache (see Upload, Cache and Retries) show the true capture time in the Photo Captures section.