Matplotlib is a go-to plotting tool in Python, which has a lot of useful features, like compatibility with the Scipy/Numpy stack. Sometimes it's useful to visualize time-series data temporally.
One very useful feature that Matplotlib has is the animations module, which allows you to animate plots with changing data [over time, for example], and save the data as a video file using FFmpeg. There's a great tutorial for Matplotlib animations here.
My only complaint about the Matplotlib animations, is that the documentation and examples are not super-comprehensive. I might create a follow-up post with some sample programs, to add to the documented examples floating around the interwebs.
In any case, once I got the animations working, I wanted to save them as a video for later on-demand viewing. I set up an animation writer with ffmpeg, x264, and let it run. Each time I ran the script, and the video saving would freeze after 820 frames.
It took a fair amount of online searching to find the answer here. It turns out that the stock Ubuntu/Debian FFmpeg and LibAV have branched apart at some point. You can obtain the "real" FFmpeg here. Once you install this, the Matplotlib animations save videos just fine.
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