While having a quick and easy way of displaying an animation is nice, you would likely need to save the animation somehow. The animation module provides the "writer" framework that allows multiple movie-writing mechanisms to be available to users. One of them that you have already seen is the simple frame-saving mechanism that is fed into ImageMagick to convert frames into an animated GIF. Three additional mechanisms are packaged with Matplotlib, namely, 'ffmpeg', 'avconv', and 'mencoder'. Actually, there are four more, but they are essentially slightly modified versions of the three and 'imagemagick'. These three writers provide interfaces to their respective encoding tools. The avconv tool is a somewhat recent fork of the popular ffmpeg tool from libav, so they are quite similar for now, while the mencoder tool is the encoder put out by the same people that release the popular "mplayer" application.

While these writer classes are packaged with Matplotlib, the tools themselves...