When I added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list file all of my problems went away.
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main After editing the sources.list file I simply did: apt-get update apt-get install transcode And all was well. I googled for 2-days before I found this. Apparently the old web site was named malirrat or something (the name of the maintainer). But the new site was not mentioned in any of the google searches, since it changed only recently. Anyway I thought this might help others with this problem.
