PyQt4 - can't get video to run with QMovie or Phonon

Question

I'm having problems getting any video player to work with my PyQt4 setup (having tried both phonon and QMovie). The below QMovie script is from an example where several users commented it as functional. For me, it runs but only opens a window (with Loading... centered) that never actually plays the .gif (I've tried several working .gif files from numerous examples online, so the file is not the problem). I've commented out the results from running the three debugging steps as well.

What can I do next?

import sys
import os
import sip
sip.setapi('QVariant', 2)
from PyQt4 import QtGui, QtCore

class BusyLabel(QtGui.QWidget):
    def __init__(self, gif, parent = None, text = None):
        QtGui.QWidget.__init__(self, parent)

        self.hlayout = QtGui.QHBoxLayout(self)
        self.hlayout.setSpacing(0)
        self.hlayout.setContentsMargins(0, 0, 0, 0)
        self.setLayout(self.hlayout)

        # Movie
        self.movieLabel = QtGui.QLabel(self)
        self.movieLabel.setSizePolicy(QtGui.QSizePolicy.Expanding, QtGui.QSizePolicy.Expanding)
        self.movieLabel.setAlignment(QtCore.Qt.AlignCenter)

        self.movie = QtGui.QMovie(gif, QtCore.QByteArray(), self)
        self.movie.setScaledSize(QtCore.QSize(20,20))
        self.movie.setCacheMode(QtGui.QMovie.CacheAll)
        self.movie.setSpeed(100)
        print self.movie.isValid() #output = False
        print self.movie.supportedFormats() #output = []

        self.movieLabel.setMovie(self.movie)
        self.hlayout.addWidget(self.movieLabel)

        # Label
        self.label = QtGui.QLabel(text)
        self.hlayout.addWidget(self.label)

        self.movie.start()

    def setText(self, text):
        self.label.setText(text)

    def start(self):
        self.show()
        self.movie.start()

    def stop(self):
        self.hide()
        self.movie.stop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    gif = 'test1.gif'
    print os.path.exists(gif) #output = True
    app = QtGui.QApplication(sys.argv)
    player = BusyLabel(gif)
    player.setText('Loading...')
    player.start()
    player.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

output: True False []

(For those curious about my other attempts, running a popular Phonon script gave the error: phonon backend plugin could not be loaded... I'll take anything at this point)

Answer 1

I'm providing here complete, working code that I've written to answer this (my) problem. All you need is PyQt4 and Matplotlib, I hope this might help someone else facing similar troubles down the road:

https://github.com/evanseitz/PyQt4_VideoPlayer