Comment 3 for bug 503448

ffmpeg defaults to non-PIC shared libraries on architectures that support it. Some Googling turned up this blog post: http://hardwarebug.org/2009/01/02/shared-library-woes-and-the-price-of-pic/ (its a bit out of date, the linker now throws an error versus a runtime crash, but there still is a performance gain on non-PIC shared libraries).