Display OpenAI gym in Jupyter notebook only

Question

I want to play with the OpenAI gyms in a notebook, with the gym being rendered inline.

Here's a basic example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import gym
from IPython import display
%matplotlib inline

env = gym.make('CartPole-v0')
env.reset()

for i in range(25):
   plt.imshow(env.render(mode='rgb_array'))
   display.display(plt.gcf())    
   display.clear_output(wait=True)
   env.step(env.action_space.sample()) # take a random action

env.close()

This works, and I get see the gym in the notebook:

But! it also opens an interactive window that shows precisely the same thing. I don't want this window to be open:

Answer 1

I made a working example here that you can fork: https://kyso.io/eoin/openai-gym-jupyter with two examples of rendering in Jupyter - one as an mp4, and another as a realtime gif.

The .mp4 example is quite simple.

import gym
from gym import wrappers

env = gym.make('SpaceInvaders-v0')
env = wrappers.Monitor(env, "./gym-results", force=True)
env.reset()
for _ in range(1000):
    action = env.action_space.sample()
    observation, reward, done, info = env.step(action)
    if done: break
env.close()

Then in a new cell

import io
import base64
from IPython.display import HTML

video = io.open('./gym-results/openaigym.video.%s.video000000.mp4' % env.file_infix, 'r+b').read()
encoded = base64.b64encode(video)
HTML(data='''
    <video width="360" height="auto" alt="test" controls><source src="data:video/mp4;base64,{0}" type="video/mp4" /></video>'''
.format(encoded.decode('ascii')))