Support for VLC video transcoding?

[beyondinferno]

I'm running subsonic on an older ubuntu 10.04 box (core2 duo) and I've run into performance issues with transcoding mkvs (with 100% cpu usage on both cores and ~800mbs of ram used). Currently, I've updated to the latest ffmpeg w/x264 and it's improved streaming a ton, but it still buffers about 20 mins into a video. I'd really like to utilize the graphics card for hardware acceleration but as far as I can tell, this is not an option with ffmpeg. I've looked though the forums and have found a ton of discussion about vlc, but no one has seemed to get it working well. would it be at all possible to maybe add the option to use vlc?
Thanks for the best app on my server, and keep up the awesome work!