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Debian unstable has official ffmpeg packages, and as soon as the next release completes, those packages will migrate to testing and future stable.

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There are a number of useful codecs and filters that have non-free licenses. Debian packages will never have them enabled. Self compiles are the only way to get the ffmpeg kitchen sink.

Almost all of the questionably licensed and non-free codecs were removed from ffmpeg years ago. The only remaining bits left are those for AAC support via libfaac, and ffmpeg has its own reimplemented version of AAC that doesn't depend on libfaac.

You might be thinking of mplayer, which has extensive support for non-free codecs, such as the "w32codecs" bundle.

Seems unlikely that the security team would be happy having both ffmpeg and libav in Debian, so a GR would be needed to override them.

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