I've been learning linear algebra and being the visual person that I am, I decided to visualize the concepts Im learning. To do this I just ask Claude to generate code to visualize some concept that I describe to it. And this works great. I dont have to worry about boilerplate code stuff right now. I will eventually learn manim but not right now. So this is perfect for me right now.

But when I installed manim into my conda env and tried to generate a visualization via

$manim -pql manim_script.py <manim_component_name>

I got an error "failed to load ffmpeg DLLs". This was related to the av python library.

Solution? Two things:

1. Download the shared version of the ffmpeg software. This has the binaries (*.exe) and the DLLs from here. Look for ffmpeg-release-full-shared.7z.

2. Copy the contents of the ffmpeg/bin folder to <conda_env_name>/Lib/site-packages/av - source

And thats it. This is not a good solution because it needs to be done everytime a new env is created. But for now this is how I solved it.