Re-compiling FFMPEG with AAC output support on Ubuntu 9.10
I have had some horrible time trying to get ffmpeg (and VLC) to output MP4 encoded with h264 video and AAC audio on plain Ubuntu 9.10. Problem is that FFMPEG doesn't have AAC encoders compiled in on this platform.
I started off with removing ffmpeg and installing it from source. Yeah. Don't try that unless you want to fuck up your whole multimedia system on Ubuntu. This is endless story, reqiures you to compile from source more and more libraries (x264dec, a52something...) and even then VLC couldn't compile from source as it was incompatible with these versions of libraries (x264 in particular).
What you (and I) should do is to re-compile only ffmpeg package and related. Thanks to Debian's great package manager, it is easy! Go check out my post on VLC forums to find out more: http://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=65851