Well, I’ve been quite busy over the past months, despite my lack of blog posts.
My brother got married.
FFmpeg finally has channel layout support for AAC and Vorbis. I’ve published my work-in-progress HE AAC v1 (Spectral Band Replication) code in FFmpeg’s Summer of Code repository (though it has nothing to do with Google SoC).
A collaboration focused on open source software between two universities in Umeå, Sweden and Vaasa, Finland called OpenKvarken held a seminar about VoIP and related technologies. I did two talks there titled: An Open Standard IPTV Implementation in MythTV and Improving FFmpeg for High Definition Video Conferencing.
The latter refers to ffmpeg-mt – multi-threaded decoding for macroblock-based codecs as developed by Alexander Strange. OpenKvarken should be funding the merge of this code into FFmpeg trunk.
I should be getting a new job with Collabora working to improve the quality of open source multimedia on the whole. It’s a very exciting venture for me and it may lead to more regular blog posts. 
Just stumbled across your blog as a result of searching for “-vpre” settings.
I wanted to post a comment to say that I’m very excited about the possibility of “improv[ing] the quality of open source multimedia on the whole”! Best of luck, and I anxiously await any and all improvements you and that team are able to provide!