The Acquisition (ACQ) component acquires essences from different media sources and can be seen as a modularised producer-consumer system. It centralises the acquisition of different media essences (images and streams), which is carried on by specialised grabbers. The individual grabbers are autonomous (and potentially remote) components.

The interaction between the different grabbers and the ACQ component is file system based, although the transfer library can decide which protocol is best suited for the specific deployment case. Interaction with the EMS component (which can be seen as a consumer) is via web services.

The ACQ component has been implemented in Perl 5 (5.8.7), so it can be installed on Windows MS, Linux and all platforms where Perl has been ported. It stores data on flat files (although the use of a DBMS can be decided and configured at runtime), so no DBMS is needed for a standard installation. Being an event-based component, hardware resources (CPU/RAM) consumption is rather small. Disk consumption is related with the size of the ACQ circular buffer.