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

This is great! I wanted to do the same. But, I could never compile the patched ffmpeg source (0.6.1) in Vista with MingW32+MSYS+pr enviroment... png_parser.c produced Error1 during compilation.

So, I came up with a jpeg solution to this using PIL. Just put your ffmpeg.exe in the same folder as this script. This should work with ffmpeg without the patch under Windows. I had to use stdin.write method rather than the communicate method which is recommended in the official documentation about subprocess. Note that the 2nd -vcodec option specifies the encoding codec. The pipe is closed by p.stdin.close().

import subprocess
import numpy as np
from PIL import Image

rate = 1
outf = 'test.avi'

cmdstring = ('ffmpeg.exe',
             '-y',
             '-r', '%d' % rate,
             '-f','image2pipe',
             '-vcodec', 'mjpeg',
             '-i', 'pipe:', 
             '-vcodec', 'libxvid',
             outf
             )
p = subprocess.Popen(cmdstring, stdin=subprocess.PIPE, shell=False)

for i in range(10):
    im = Image.fromarray(np.uint8(np.random.randn(100,100)))
    p.stdin.write(im.tostring('jpeg','L'))
    #p.communicate(im.tostring('jpeg','L'))

p.stdin.close()