CamGrabber

CamGrabber is a companion application that photographs your advertising screens. It connects to IP cameras pointed at a screen, takes a stop-frame photo capture when the player shows an ad, and uploads the photo to the CS Play server. The result is a photo report: visual proof that each ad actually played on the physical screen.

CamGrabber runs on the same device as the CS Player (or next to it), watches the player’s playback events, and needs no manual attention after setup.

How it works

  1. The CS Player reports each ad show to CamGrabber, including which frame of the screen played the ad.

  2. CamGrabber grabs a stop-frame from the camera stream bound to that frame.

  3. The photo capture is queued and uploaded to the CS Play server together with the show metadata.

  4. The server attaches the photo capture to the show, and it appears in the Photo Captures section of the web interface.

If the server is unreachable, photo captures wait in a local cache and upload later — see Upload, Cache and Retries.

Free and paid versions

CamGrabber is licensed per installation:

  • The free license is granted automatically and photographs only CS Context programmatic shows.

  • The paid license unlocks photo reporting of your own content: capture counts per ad, per-campaign 100% coverage, and a daily re-shoot schedule.

See Licensing for details.

Where to start

  1. Install CamGrabber on the device: Windows, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi.

  2. Connect it to the player and your CS Play account: Connecting to Player and Server.

  3. Bind a camera to each frame you want photographed: Camera Settings.

  4. Read How Photos Are Captured to control what gets photographed and when.

Terminology

This documentation follows the unified CityScreen terminology. Key terms:

Photo capture

A stop-frame taken from the camera stream at the moment an ad plays; the unit of photo reporting.

Show

A single playback of an advertisement on a screen.

Frame

An independently playing region of a screen. Multi-sided or composite screens have several frames; each frame can have its own camera.

Photo report

The set of photo captures confirming that ads played on the physical screen.

The full industry glossary lives in the Terminology component.