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Due to legal issues Debian does not contain the necessary libmp3lame libraries that ffmpeg depends on for encoding MP3 files. However you've a couple of options to get around this issue.

• RareWares.org provides a Debian repository that you can include in your apt.sources file and install the necessary libraries from there. You should use the unstable branch since it contains quite recent LAME libraries (3.96, 3.97 and 4.0 are all available).
• You can compile you're own LAME libs quite easily.

I'll go into detail on the latter one. To make life easier, I did not create a debian package from scratch for the LAME libs, but instead used Ubuntu's packages and compiled them on the Debian server. If you've an Ubuntu server at hand, then just download the sources:

If you've no Ubuntu nearby, you'll have to manually download the required bundles (*.tar.gz, diffs, etc.) and apply all the patches.

In the end you'll have a lame-3.97 (or similiar) directory with the recent (already patched) version of the source. Copy this to your Debian server and compile the package. But first you need to get the packages that are required for building the libs. Take a look at the debian/control file in the LAME sources directory and look for the line starting with Build-Depends:. You've to install the packages you find there on your Debian server:

You've to install the fakeroot package too since it'll be required in the packaging process. Or you can skip it if you're building as root.

Now comes the building (you should enter the LAME sources dir first):

This'll produce four packages (.deb files) in the parent dir of the LAME sources directory:

• lame
• lame-extras
• liblame0
• liblame-dev

For ffmpeg we need only the latter two. So let's install them:

Now we can compile our ffmpeg. First fetch the sources:

We've to make a few changes to the Debian package files. Add the --enable-mp3lame option to the confflags variable in debian/rules. Like this:

Now add the liblame-dev package to ffmpeg's dependencies in debian/control:

You can also add your own entry to the changelog (in debian/changelog) in case you want to have your own version number for the package.

Now in the ffmpeg source dir start the package build process:

This created a number of DEBs in the parent dir. The ffmpeg package depends on libavcodec0d and libavformat0d. These were also built now and it is crucial that you install these custom builds and not the ones from the APT repository (remove them if they are already installed from APT). Otherwise your mp3 encoding support will not work.

After you installed all your custom packages, you're ready.

PS: to make sure that an apt-get upgrade does not ruin your efforts by overwriting your packages with newer versions from your repositories, you should use dpkg --set-selections to keep your own packages on hold.