Cannot save matplotlib animation with ffmpeg

Question

I am trying to save a simple matplotlib animation from Jake Vanderplas, but I keep getting OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied.

I should note that I

Answer 1

Thank you Stretch for your valuable answer. I found that mentioning extra args inside anim.save() results in error. Hence the code is updated as shown below,

import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import animation
plt.rcParams['animation.ffmpeg_path'] = r'I:\FFmpeg\bin\ffmpeg' #make sure you download FFmpeg files for windows 10 from https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

fig = plt.figure()
ax = plt.axes(xlim=(0, 2), ylim=(-2, 2))
line, = ax.plot([], [], lw=2)

def init():
    line.set_data([], [])
    return line,

def animate(i):
    x = np.linspace(0, 2, 1000)
    y = np.sin(2 * np.pi * (x - 0.01 * i))
    line.set_data(x, y)
    return line,

anim = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, animate, init_func=init, frames=200, interval=20, blit=True)

FFwriter=animation.FFMpegWriter(fps=30, extra_args=['-vcodec', 'libx264'])
anim.save(r'I:\Understanding_objective functions\test\basic_animation.mp4', writer=FFwriter)

plt.show()

Hope this might helps someone trying to save animation plots to .mp4 format.