Matplotlib-Animation "No MovieWriters Available"

Question

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?

Answer 1

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)