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.

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()