[FIXED] Matplotlib-Animation "No MovieWriters Available"

Issue

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?

Solution

Had the same problem....managed to get it to work after a little while.

Thing to do is follow instructions on installing FFmpeg - which is (at least on windows) a bundle of executables you need to set a path to in your environment variables

http://www.wikihow.com/Install-FFmpeg-on-Windows

Download from ffmpeg.org

Hope this helps someone - even after a while after the question - good luck

Answered By - JPH