Removing the seconds from x-axis time labels in matplotlib

Question

I would like to remove seconds from my x-axis labels as they are unnecessary.

Also I want to center align the tick labels instead of have them positioned to the left of the tick mark.

Any suggestions on how to do this?

Here is some of the code that I've used if this helps

fig=plt.figure()
ax=fig.add_subplot(111)
line1 = plot(table.index,table[data],color=colors[0])

fig.autofmt_xdate(rotation=0)   

tickFormat =  matplotlib.ticker.LinearLocator(numticks=5)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(tickFormat)            

Answer 1

from matplotlib.dates import DateFormatter
formatter = DateFormatter('%H:%M')
plt.gcf().axes[0].xaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)