Frame grabbing

Use a MovieWriter directly to grab individual frames and write them to a file. This avoids any event loop integration, and thus works even with the Agg backend. This is not recommended for use in an interactive setting.

Output generated via matplotlib.animation.Animation.to_jshtml.

import numpy as np

import matplotlib

matplotlib.use("Agg")
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

from matplotlib.animation import FFMpegWriter

# Fixing random state for reproducibility
np.random.seed(19680801)


metadata = dict(title='Movie Test', artist='Matplotlib',
                comment='Movie support!')
writer = FFMpegWriter(fps=15, metadata=metadata)

fig = plt.figure()
l, = plt.plot([], [], 'k-o')

plt.xlim(-5, 5)
plt.ylim(-5, 5)

x0, y0 = 0, 0

with writer.saving(fig, "writer_test.mp4", 100):
    for i in range(100):
        x0 += 0.1 * np.random.randn()
        y0 += 0.1 * np.random.randn()
        l.set_data(x0, y0)
        writer.grab_frame()