I’ve been watching the steady progress of the Release Checklist Wiki
The FFMPEG row in the list has remained at its current state “Unknown” while all the others have been finishing.
I’m concerned that this may mean we Windows users will miss out on FFMPEG again this release.
Can anyone calm the fears of a poor windows Blenderhead? 
Cheers.
the best I could do is to advise you to drink herbal tea. I think its Harkyman workin on this, but he cant find a quicktime ffmpeg driver, or something like that, cause qt is proprietary and all that or something. So, you might have to upgrade to Ubuntu to get ffmpeg. I hear it is and has been working fine with that upgrade for awhile.
Ah - OK. Herbal tea infusing now…
I tried Ubantu, but being a Windows person, had trouble getting the right drivers to work for my ATI card, so Blender was slow. (Everything else was fine, but if Blender is slow then the whole world just comes down around our ears!); so back to Gatesland.
i asked the missus for a new dual core motherboard for valentines day, along with a gig of ram and a 600g hard drive (total price: $300). and was seriosly thinking of giving ubuntu a try cause vista just aint doin it for me. so i’ll see if she loves me or whether I just have to spin my quads some more.
Mmmm - romantic!
Windows users need not miss out. I have made a small GUI for ffmpeg. You can get that here. Christianstoray.com : FFFront Download
I read about blender having NLE capability with FFmpeg since the last version but I’ve missed out on playing with it due to learning other functions. Is there any docs on using Blender as an NLE? The wiki seems a bit devoid in this area.
@mongrol: i just finished documenting the Vdieo Sequence Editor functionality in Blender. See the wiki, it’s in the User Manual in the compositing and rendering section, under Video Editing i think. It is the non-linear editor, supports scrubbing and splicing and effects etc and you can freely mix and match any image type supported (stills, scenes, movies). You can import audio for synchronization purposes, but cannot export an avi with an audio track(s). that’s why we are so anxious for ffmpeg so we can create our own mpegs with sound directly out of blender, on Windows. It evidently works if you have Linux machine, but not on Windows yet.
The work around is to use Christian’s application (see above) or other outside apps (such as VirtualDub). So, while cool to have, it is not absolutely necessary.
If all else fails, use one of jms’s compilations (which rock). Make sure to download the separate ffmpeg dll files and drop them in the blender dir.
Really, ffmpeg covers some possibilities in windows that no codec gives us.
I use JMS’ CVS builds as my main Blender program. Been using them for ~8 months now.
I only use 2.42a or 2.43rcXX to verify a problem or question that arises.
Mike