If there's only a static lib then I guess it's fine. Is that the case
on all major distros?
I just dug through a bunch of distros and no one ships ffmpeg by default. That includes Fedora 4, SuSE 9.2/9.3, Mandriva 10.1, and Slackware 10.1. It's marked "optional" on Debian sarge.
-Brian