[matplotlib-devel] animation (part 2)

[Abraham S. <ab...@cn...>]

Hi. I have the need to both display animations real time and to save 
them as files. Unfortunately, currently there doesn't seem a good 
unified method (although code currently exists on the web page to do 
both). I decided to try to unify animations with a couple of simple 
Python classes:

AnimationController - attached to an already drawn plot, and determines 
how specific plot will change over time (this is base class, so the 
functions: reset(), next(), prev(), and data() have to be overridden)
Animation - A collection of plots and AnimationControllers (1-to-1). 
Each cycle will have AnimationController update their corresponding 
plots (this is base class, so the function run() has to be overridden)

Then I have two backends for the Animation:
GTKAnimation - creates a 'live' animation
FileAnimation - creates an MPEG file

so all you need to do, is create your own AnimationController, and you 
can automatically create an MPEG file, or display the data live.

I thought I would throw this out there, and see if maybe other people 
were interested (and if maybe a toolkit should be created). Theres still 
some work to make it more flexible, and have more backends. Also, the 
FileAnimation is really a bad hack (using techniques suggested from 
previous posts). On my current system I couldn't get mencoder to work 
correctly (or mplayer, for that matter), so I had to use 'convert', but 
it's fairly easy to change it. Of course, ideally using the FFMPEG 
library would be best, but I don't have time to write the necessary SWIG 
files just now.

Also included is a quick example of phase-shifting sine-waves.

Abe