Grabber

The grabber is the second element of the channel. A grabber is a part of a frame grabber able to read the video signal issued by the camera and to transfer the resulting image to the host PC memory. A grabber is a set of hardware resources used by a channel.

As shown on the figure below, some frame grabbers accept a higher number of cameras than the number of grabbers. The grabber acquires the images coming from each camera in turn.

The user does not have to worry about the grabber sharing between channels. He only has to create as many channels as he needs.

The figure below illustrates the principle with two cameras and one grabber, the channels highlighted in red and blue share the same acquisition resources:

The source router on the figure operates as a switch and allows MultiCam to select one of the two cameras.