[python] Matplotlib-Animation "No MovieWriters Available"

Under Linux, I've been checking out matplotlib's animation class, and it seems to work except that I cant initialise the movie writer to write out the movie.

Using either of the examples:

• http://matplotlib.org/examples/animation/moviewriter.html
• http://matplotlib.org/examples/animation/basic_example_writer.html

results in the error "RuntimeError: No MovieWriters available!"

Im using matplotlib version 1.3.x and have installed (hopefully) all the codecs.

Can someone please suggest as to why I get this error? If its a codecs issue, which codecs (+versions) should I install? If its something else that's broken, is there an alternative for creating animations in python?

I had the following error while running the cell.

This may be due to not having ffmpeg in your system. Try the following command in your terminal.

sudo apt install ffmpeg

This works for me. I hope it will work out for you too.

I'm running Ubuntu 20 and I had a similar problem

Installed ffmpeg

pip install ffmpeg

then

sudo apt install ffmpeg

If you are using Ubuntu 14.04 ffmpeg is not available. You can install it by using the instructions directly from https://www.ffmpeg.org/download.html.

In short you will have to:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mc3man/trusty-media
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg

If this does not work maybe try using sudo apt-get dist-upgrade but this may broke things in your system.

(be sure to follow JPH feedback above about the proper ffmpeg download) Not sure why, but in my case here is the one that worked (in my case was on windows).

Initialize a writer:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation
Writer = animation.FFMpegWriter(fps=30, codec='libx264')  #or 
Writer = animation.FFMpegWriter(fps=20, metadata=dict(artist='Me'), bitrate=1800) ==> This is WORKED FINE ^_^

Writer = animation.writers['ffmpeg'] ==> GIVES ERROR ""RuntimeError: Requested MovieWriter (ffmpeg) not available""

For fellow googlers using Anaconda, install the ffmpeg package:

conda install -c conda-forge ffmpeg

This works on Windows too.

(Original answer used menpo package owner but as mentioned by @harsh their version is a little behind at time of writing)

I know this question is about Linux, but in case someone stumbles on this problem on Mac like I did here is the solution for that. I had the exact same problem on Mac because ffmpeg is not installed by default apparently, and so I could solve it using:

brew install yasm
brew install ffmpeg

Had the same problem under Linux. By default the animate.save method is using ffmpeg but it seems to be deprecated. https://askubuntu.com/questions/432542/is-ffmpeg-missing-from-the-official-repositories-in-14-04

Solution: Install some coder, like avconv or mencoder. Provide the alternative coder in the call:

ani.save('the_movie.mp4', writer = 'mencoder', fps=15)