For some legal reasons, Ubuntu does not ship with some important features in ffmpeg enabled. It appears that support for faac AAC encoding is stripped. The older tutorials for building from source don't seem to work.

So, I went to the original sources.

I don't have the full instructions yet, but here are some tips.

Use the latest ffmpeg.

Use the latest x264.

Configure both without the --enable-shared flag.
Configure x264 with --enable-pic.
Configure ffmpet without the --disable-static flag.

I suspect there are better arrangements so that everything can make a shared library... but often you just need to get ffmpeg running.