Matplotlib-Animation "No MovieWriters Available"

For fellow googlers using Anaconda, install the ffmpeg package:

conda install -c conda-forge ffmpeg

This works on Windows too.

(Original answer used menpo package owner but as mentioned by @harsh their version is a little behind at time of writing)

Had the same problem under Linux. By default the animate.save method is using ffmpeg but it seems to be deprecated. https://askubuntu.com/questions/432542/is-ffmpeg-missing-from-the-official-repositories-in-14-04

Solution: Install some coder, like avconv or mencoder. Provide the alternative coder in the call:

ani.save('the_movie.mp4', writer = 'mencoder', fps=15)

Had the same problem....managed to get it to work after a little while.

Thing to do is follow instructions on installing FFmpeg - which is (at least on windows) a bundle of executables you need to set a path to in your environment variables

http://www.wikihow.com/Install-FFmpeg-on-Windows

Download from ffmpeg.org

Hope this helps someone - even after a while after the question - good luck

I know this question is about Linux, but in case someone stumbles on this problem on Mac like I did here is the solution for that. I had the exact same problem on Mac because ffmpeg is not installed by default apparently, and so I could solve it using:

brew install yasm
brew install ffmpeg