How to check which writers are available for saving an animation

Question

I am using matplotlib to make an animation of the evolution of a system over time. I want to be able to save the animation as a file. My default choice is to save as an .mp4 file, which means I should use the ffmpeg writer like this:

anim.save(filename="system_evolution.mp4", writer="ffmpeg", fps=30)

The problem is that I am sharing my code with my classmates who don't necessarily have ffmpeg installed on their systems. In this case, I would like to fall back to saving a .gif of the animation using pillow (most of them install Python using Anaconda so they probably have Pillow installed as well). How can I check which writers are available to use for saving the animation?

I would like to have something like this:

if ffmpeg_available():
    print("Saving system_evolution.mp4")
    anim.save(filename="system_evolution.mp4", writer="ffmpeg", fps=30)
elif pillow_available():
    print("Saving system_evolution.gif")
    anim.save(filename="system_evolution.gif", writer="pillow", fps=30)
else:
    print("Please install either ffmpeg to save a mp4 or pillow to save a gif.")

I couldn't figure out how to actually check if ffmpeg or pillow are available, which means the program crashes when I try to save an .mp4 and ffmpeg isn't installed. How can this be checked?

Answer 1

According to this, the writers object in this module has a method called is_available() which can be used to check if a specific writer is available.

You can do sth like that

import matplotlib.animation as animation

def ffmpeg_available():
    return animation.writers.is_available('ffmpeg')

def pillow_available():
    return animation.writers.is_available('pillow')

if ffmpeg_available():
    print("Saving system_evolution.mp4")
    anim.save(filename="system_evolution.mp4", writer="ffmpeg", fps=30)
elif pillow_available():
    print("Saving system_evolution.gif")
    anim.save(filename="system_evolution.gif", writer="pillow", fps=30)
else:
    print("Please install either ffmpeg to save a mp4 or pillow to save a gif.")