Re: [Matplotlib-users] Saving animations

On 10/05/2012 02:49 AM, Ryan May wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 12:38 PM, Andreas Mueller
> <amu...@ai...> wrote:
>> On 10/04/2012 03:51 PM, Benjamin Root wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Andreas Mueller <amu...@ai...>
>> wrote:
>>> Hi everybody.
>>> I have been trying to save some animations I made and I encountered the
>>> problem mentioned here.
>>> I am using current master.
>>> To be precise, when I use
>>> anim.save("file.mp4", fps=10, extra_args=['-vcodec', 'libx264'])
>>> I get "RuntimeError: Error writing to file" from the agg backend.
>>> If I don't use the extra_args, it works, but I get very, very bad
>>> quality that can not be redeemed using bitrate.
>>> I have ffmpeg and libx264 installed. I also tried the mencoder by passing
>>> MencoderWriter() to save, but that resulted in a video where all frames
>>> are identical.
>>>
>>> Any help on this would be appreciated. Is there an easy way to just dump
>>> the frames? I can do the mencoder bit myself.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Andy
>>>
>> Exactly which version of mpl are you using, and what is your platform?  This
>> will help us diagnose what is going on.
>>
>>
>>> Thanks for the quick answer.
>>> I am not on the box but I used master from yesterday, so
>>> 89482b21c8582d49a2ddc2865e472eb404fd07e2, I guess.
>>> The platform is Ubuntu Precise (with loads of random Python packages, but
>>> that seems somewhat unrelated).
> I'm on Ubuntu Precise (12.04) here as well. No problems with/without,
> but I'm noticing the extra_args aren't being used (which I think is a
> known bug I need to fix.) Can you run with --verbose-debug and post
> the relevant output? (Or just compress and attach.)
Thanks for the tip. I didn't know about ``--verbose-debug``.
It told me Unknown encoder 'libx264'.
I found out I need to install libavcodec-extra-53 for it to work.
Not everything is going smoothly.

It would be great if the docs could be updated with how to specify
a codec btw. I only found out by chance.

Thanks for your help, andy