> Note: While I was not looking, what is the state with Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic).

I searched around a while and it seems that mencoder was dropped in Utopic as well.
Not sure if the mencoder package from deb-multimedia would install in Ubuntu, since some dependency may not be satisfy.
If it installs ok, we can probably stick with the package from deb-multimedia for the time being. If not, we probably need to add mencoder to the depencency package list. Could you do a test on an Utopic installation?

Cheers
  Michele