I've gleaned much useful info from these forums over the past few years that I've been messing around with Linux. I finally had to register, because despite a copious amount of searching I haven't been able to determine how to pull this off.

I am using Debian testing, with the deb-multimedia repositories additionally installed.

I built ffmpeg and libvidstab from source, because libvidstab had new stabilization features that had not yet been incorporated into the repos and I wanted to play with the new stuff. I'm using /usr/local as my prefix for all my own compiles. ldconfig is configured to search /usr/local/bin before /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu, and I make sure to run a "sudo ldconfig" after installing a new binary to make sure the system is aware of it.

There seem to be some incompatibilities between the versions of libavcodec55 and libavformat55 that are in the repos with those that I compiled specifically with commands that libvidstab uses. If I remove everything ffmpeg, libfdk, libavcodec, and x264 related via "apt-get remove", the self-compiled version runs great. Unfortunately, because of dependencies, this also removes gimp and vlc - both of which I use regularly.

Now, when I reinstall vlc, of course it doesn't think I have libavcodec55 and friends installed, so installs the repo version. I've tried using aptitude to mark that those libraries are installed, but that doesn't seem to work - perhaps I'm doing that wrong?

This leads to the following two questions:
1) Is there a way to tell the system that I already have libavcodec55, libavformat55, etc?
2) Alternatively, is there a way to install the ffmpeg libraries separate from ffmpeg so apt knows they exist?

Thanks for putting up with what is probably a silly question, and let me know if I'm missing any useful info that will help. Being my first post, I'm sure I've forgotten something obvious!

So today, I've been doing some reading about the Debian packaging tools. My process prior to today has been using checkinstall to create the package, as below.
I managed to create a Debian package following the IntroDebianPackaging guide on the official wiki. After some finessing and tweaking of various rules and control files, I was able to create an installable .deb package of the entire ffmpeg suite, with included shared libraries (exactly what checkinstall spat out for me, with much less work...)

So, now I have to figure out how to tell it that I want to create a "libavcodec55-version.deb", "libavdevice55-version.deb", etc for the rest of the shared libraries. I feel like I've made some headway by learning the proper dh_make, debhelper, and dpkg-buildpackage tools, but just not sure how or what I need to set as my configuration to build the libraries by themselves. Here's hoping for a slow day at work tomorrow as well...

Ok, so yesterday got busy and I couldn't play with this, but had some time this morning. I decided to grab the source from the deb-multimedia repo for the ffmpeg package, and see how Christian Marillat, the maintainer of the package had done it.

For anyone who comes after seeking the solution it turned out to be quite simple. I just had to define extra packages with appropriate depends and whatnot in the control file! I copied his, and modified to suit what I was doing, et voila - when I issued dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc (because I'm not distributing it) I had all the .deb files I was looking for in the root of my source folder! Going to figure out how to mark this thread solved.