ffdshow homepage has not been updated in 1.5 years;
ffdshow sourceforge's project is 1 year old as well
I guess the place where you'll find most infos regarding ffdshow is on
doom9's forum (not really a help thread but you can see there's some work going on).
as for ffdshow's properties being greyed out in preferences... you must be playing a file for them to be available ;)
(btw, we're drifting off topic, aren't we ;) )