Ha! I see, can set rcParams['animation.writer'] = 'avconv'. It's set by default to ffmpeg in my case, not sure why. It could be that Jupyter should actually have smarter defaults.

You can also set the parameter in your matplotlibrc file as well to be more permanent.

I could have sworn Debian switched back to ffmpeg since avconv is less developed/secure.

To be clear anim.save() and anim.to_html5_video() are two completely different things. The former is for manually saving the animation to whatever format you want; the latter is for notebook inline views, and is called automatically if the animation.html rcparameter is set to 'html5'.

The reason the html5 video is locked to ffmpeg is because that's the only one for which I was able to reliably find the magic incantation to create h264 video that plays in multiple browers on multiple platforms. Incantations for other tools welcome, but making them robust wasn't simple, at least as simple as I expected.

How to do

rcParams['animation.writer'] = 'avconv'

I can not solve this problem:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
KeyError                                  Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-6-5114ccf53b4c> in <module>()
----> 1 HTML(anim.to_html5_video())

/home/mountain/anaconda3/envs/biomedickeras/lib/python2.7/site-packages/matplotlib/animation.pyc in to_html5_video(self)
   1153                 # We create a writer manually so that we can get the
   1154                 # appropriate size for the tag
-> 1155                 Writer = writers[rcParams['animation.writer']]
   1156                 writer = Writer(codec='h264',
   1157                                 bitrate=rcParams['animation.bitrate'],

/home/mountain/anaconda3/envs/biomedickeras/lib/python2.7/site-packages/matplotlib/animation.pyc in __getitem__(self, name)
    128         if not self.avail:
    129             raise RuntimeError("No MovieWriters available!")
--> 130         return self.avail[name]
    131 
    132 writers = MovieWriterRegistry()

KeyError: u'ffmpeg'

import matplotlib
print(matplotlib.animation.writers.list())

This show what's available.

There are two issues here:

1. I've avconv on my system but it's not detected: animation.py line 426 and overwritten line 616. The issue seems to be that 'Libav' is in the output ('Libav' in err.decode()). This seems to be a bug.
2. It should do like if name not in self.avail: raise RuntimeError("Current animation.writer ({}) is not one of available writers detected ({}).".format(name, self.avail))

@wernight I believe that #8743 is a fix for your issue.

@tacaswell Probably a fix for (1). I'd suggest also fixing (2).

@wernight I'd merge a PR doing so--would you submit?

It would take me a lot of time to test it. I almost wrote the change here in my comment.

Is this issue still open? If yes, I would like to try tackling it.

Seems like it’s still an issue but I’ve not tested. Test it first and if it’s an issue go ahead and follow up with a PR!

This issue has been marked "inactive" because it has been 365 days since the last comment. If this issue is still present in recent Matplotlib releases, or the feature request is still wanted, please leave a comment and this label will be removed. If there are no updates in another 30 days, this issue will be automatically closed, but you are free to re-open or create a new issue if needed. We value issue reports, and this procedure is meant to help us resurface and prioritize issues that have not been addressed yet, not make them disappear. Thanks for your help!

Libav/avconv is now completely abandoned, so no reason to support it here