Displaying saved animations

Can a saved animation be displayed in a generated file? I’m using

class Animator(matplotlib.animation.TimedAnimation):
    def __init__(self):
        animation.TimedAnimation.__init__(self, ...)

Animator().save(fps=..., savefig_kwargs=...)

where animation behavior is controlled in save, which I presume can’t be scraped. In my context it also fails to animate entirely but I’ve not yet reproduced minimally (a minimal example works fine).

I imagine something like

ani.save("path.mp4")
some_sphinx_gallery_function("path.mp4")

and I’m aware there’s ways to insert images via standard sphinx functionality, but don’t know how to do it inline for HTML generated from .py by sphinx-gallery.

[larsoner]

‘image_scrapers’: (‘matplotlib’, CustomScraper()) appends my scraper to the existing one.

Yep, and they will run in that order (mpl then yours).

Scrapers execute after every cell.

Yes indeed, see:

https://sphinx-gallery.github.io/stable/advanced.html#write-a-custom-image-scraper

in particular the quote:

This function will be called once for each code block of your examples

sphinx-gallery doesn’t support .mp4 saved animations

SG internally just supports mpl (including animations if used properly) and mayavi, with PyVista and PyGMT maintaining their implementations. Other formats – including any saved to disk – are left to the user to support.

[OverLordGoldDragon]

What I learned:

1. 'image_scrapers': ('matplotlib', CustomScraper()) appends my scraper to the existing one.
2. Scrapers execute after every cell.
3. sphinx-gallery doesn’t support .mp4 saved animations, so one must either 1) save as .gif instead, or 2) .mp4 -> .gif in the scraper. Useful: _anim_rst in scrapers.

Can you confirm? I’ve extended the PNGScraper to encompass all supported formats:

class PlotScraper(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.seen = set()

    def __repr__(self):
        return 'PlotScraper'

    def __call__(self, block, block_vars, gallery_conf):
        # Find all supported plot files in the directory of this example.
        path_current_example = os.path.dirname(block_vars['src_file'])
        supported = ('png', 'jpg', 'svg', 'gif')
        files = [values for ext in supported for values in
                 sorted(glob(os.path.join(path_current_example, f'*.{ext}')))]

        # Iterate through files, copy them to the sphinx-gallery output directory
        file_names = list()
        image_path_iterator = block_vars['image_path_iterator']
        for file in files:
            if file not in self.seen:
                self.seen |= set(file)
                this_path = image_path_iterator.next()
                this_path = this_path.replace(Path(this_path).suffix,
                                              Path(file).suffix)
                file_names.append(this_path)
                shutil.move(file, this_path)
        # Use the `figure_rst` helper function to generate rST for image files
        return figure_rst(file_names, gallery_conf['src_dir'])