ffmpeg not finding vcodec libx264

You need to configure with ./configure --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 and you need recent x264.

I found an link to a binary static build on this forum and it worked completely out of the box!

Long story short

$ wget https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/releases/ffmpeg-release-amd64-static.tar.xz
$ tar xvf ffmpeg-release-amd64-static.tar.xz
$ cd ffmpeg-4.1.1-amd64-static

$ ./ffmpeg
ffmpeg version 4.1.1-static https://johnvansickle.com/ffmpeg/
...

In Ubuntu 10.10 (maverick) this codec is provided by package libavcodec-extra-53 from multiverse repository.

try installing using apt-get install and not by compiling the source. It will download all necessary codec libraries (at least on my gubuntu)