My smilutils package is currently built without FFMPEG support. Partly because I forgot to enable it, but mostly because Sam Hocevar's ffmpeg package still hasn't been accepted into unstable after several months. So of course, someone eventually submitted bug report #283914 asking for this omission to be fixed. Which cannot be done, of course.
I'd much rather see the real problem fixed, but as a temporary workaround I uploaded smilutils+ffmpeg to my unofficial apt repository. It's basically the same package, with a small patch applied to add build-dependencies and make sure ffmpeg2raw is built. It conflicts with smilutils, of course, since it replaces (and extends) it. Feel free to use it, and if problems arise, feel free to not report them. Lobby the Debian ftp-master team instead, so that I can make smilutils in Debian complete. If you can't be bothered to do so, be warned: I think at some point I'll stop providing binary packages for stuff that can't be made available in Debian proper. That currently means smilutils+ffmpeg, ffmpeg2theora, which suffers from the same problem, and a very slightly patched (as compared to Sam's) ffmpeg package.
In other news, there's a new category in my blog. It's called Bric-à-brac, and it will contain random thoughts and bits of stuff. Not all of the articles posted in it will even be in English (as a matter of fact, the current two are in French).
