Thanks for all the suggestions, for future reference here's a summary of my results producing various kinds of quicktime compatible videos from matplotlib. I used Ubuntu Jaunty and had the medibuntu codecs installed. The target audience is undergraduates, so straightforward is good.
Executive summary: either MOV or mjpeg work with quicktime 7.6.2 as-is. Ogg-vorbis is the compression winner, so requiring that students install vlc is another option for large animations. 1) MOV ffmpeg -r 60 -i shum%05d.png -vcodec libx264 -b 2000k out.mov http://clouds.eos.ubc.ca/~phil/video/samples/out.mov size: 0.9 Mbytes note: works with my (patient) colleague's stock QT 7.6.2 2) FLV ffmpeg -r 60 -i shum%05d.png -vcodec libx264 -b 2000k out.flv http://clouds.eos.ubc.ca/~phil/video/samples/out.flv size: 0.9 Mbytes note: Safari tried to open this as a text file 3) WMV2: ffmpeg -r 60 -i shum%05d.png -vcodec wmv2 -b 2000k out.avi http://clouds.eos.ubc.ca/~phil/video/samples/out.avi size: 1.1 Mbytes note: no luck getting quicktime to recognize this, even after we installed the codecs from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx 4) jpeg: mencoder -nosound -ovc lavc \ -lavcopts vbitrate=5000:vcodec=mjpeg \ -mf type=png:fps=15 -o moviejpeg.avi mf://\*.png -v http://clouds.eos.ubc.ca/~phil/video/samples/moviejpeg.avi size: 5.7 Mbytes note: works, although not svelt 5) ogv ffmpeg2theora --nosound --optimize --width 800 --height 600 --inputfps=15 --aspect 4:3 shum%05d.png -o movie.ogv http://clouds.eos.ubc.ca/~phil/video/samples/movie.ogv size: 0.33 Mbytes (!) note: we followed the install instructions at http://www.theora.org/downloads/ but Safari didn't recognize the ogv suffix, and didn't offer to associate it with a player ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
