Matplotlib MovieWriters animation not working on Ubuntu 12.04
I am trying to keep a matplotlib animation in a movie across ffmpeg
on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (32-bit desktop). Following the matplotlib example , it doesn't load the animation writer: AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'writers'
(line 15 of the example):
import numpy as np
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use("Agg")
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation
def update_line(num, data, line):
line.set_data(data[...,:num])
return line,
# Set up formatting for the movie files
Writer = animation.writers['ffmpeg']
Through apt-get
I tried to install ffmpeg, every codec imaginable, and even tried to compile ffmpeg from source. Nothing works.
How do I get matplotlib
to talk to ffmpeg on Ubuntu?
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If you are using the unbuntu
packaged version matplotlib
, this is 1.1.1rc1
. The attribute writers
was added about 3 months after this tag and is in versions 1.2
and later.
You can install matplotlib
from source (that's what I'm doing, it's not too bad) or you can use the daily ppa .
My advice for compiling from source is to use the packaging system for as many dependencies as possible and install matplotlib
manually (if you want to use pip see this answer ) as such
git clone git://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib.git
cd matplotlib
git checkout -b v1.2.0
python setup.py install --prefix=/home/username/local_installs/
(which will give you the latest stable release), then make sure the path where it was installed is in yours $PYTHONPATH
, which can be done by including the line
export PYTHONPATH=/home/username/local_installs/lib/python2.7/site-packages/:$PYTHONPATH
in your file ~/.bashrc
. You may need to change this line slightly depending on the version of python you are using. You may need to do this (and make sure the folders exist) before you setup.py
are happy.
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