Generating movie from python without saving individual frames to files

Question

I would like to create an h264 or divx movie from frames that I generate in a python script in matplotlib. There are about 100k frames in this movie.

In examples on

Answer 1

Converting to image formats is quite slow and adds dependencies. After looking at these page and other I got it working using raw uncoded buffers using mencoder (ffmpeg solution still wanted).

Details at: http://vokicodder.blogspot.com/2011/02/numpy-arrays-to-video.html

import subprocess

import numpy as np

class VideoSink(object) :

    def __init__( self, size, filename="output", rate=10, byteorder="bgra" ) :
            self.size = size
            cmdstring  = ('mencoder',
                    '/dev/stdin',
                    '-demuxer', 'rawvideo',
                    '-rawvideo', 'w=%i:h=%i'%size[::-1]+":fps=%i:format=%s"%(rate,byteorder),
                    '-o', filename+'.avi',
                    '-ovc', 'lavc',
                    )
            self.p = subprocess.Popen(cmdstring, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, shell=False)

    def run(self, image) :
            assert image.shape == self.size
            self.p.stdin.write(image.tostring())
    def close(self) :
            self.p.stdin.close()

I got some nice speedups.