visualise html video with matplotlib animation - html

Question

In my notebook I get some data from URL, perform some analysis and do some plotting.
I want also create a html animation using FuncAnimation of matplotlib.animation.
So in the preamble I do
import matplotlib.animation as manim
plt.rcParams["animation.html"] = "html5"
%matplotlib inline
(something else... def init()..., def animate(i)...) then
anima = manim.FuncAnimation(fig,
animate,
init_func=init,
frames=len(ypos)-d0,
interval=200,
repeat=False,
blit=True)
To visualise, I then call
FFMpegWriter = manim.writers['ffmpeg']
writer = FFMpegWriter(fps=15)
link = anima.to_html5_video()
from IPython.core.display import display, HTML
display(HTML(link))
because I want the clip to show up as a neat html video in the notebook
Whereas this works well on my machine, on Watson-Studio I get the following error:
RuntimeError: Requested MovieWriter (ffmpeg) not available
I've checked that ffmpeg is available in the form of a Python package
(!pip freeze --isolated | grep ffmpeg gives ffmpeg-python==0.2.0)
The question is: how can I tell matplotlib.animation.writers to use the codec in ffmpeg-python?
Many thanks to all responders and supporters

Answer 1

We currently don't have ffmpeg pre-installed in Watson Studio on Cloud. The package ffmpeg-python that you mention is just a Python wrapper, but it won't work without the actual ffmpeg.
You can install ffmpeg from conda:
!conda install ffmpeg
Once you have the full list of additional packages that your notebook needs, I recommend to create a custom environment. Then you don't have to put install commands into the actual notebook.
The customization might look like this:
dependencies:
- ffmpeg=4.2.2
- pip
- pip:
- ffmpeg-python==0.2.0