As posted on IRC, playing video with totem the sound stutters with osssink &
doesn't play at all with alsasink. Totem gives a lot of the following output :

<foser> (totem:23302): GStreamer-CRITICAL **: file gstelement.c: line 941
(gst_element_set_time_delay): assertion `GST_IS_CLOCK (element->clock)' failed
<foser> (totem:23302): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: g_value_get_pointer: assertion
`G_VALUE_HOLDS_POINTER (value)' failed

According to Ronald this has todo with the removal of a hack for a core
deficiency in <=gstreamer-0.8.7 . Reversing this patch does indeed fix it.

<BBB> what core is that?
<BBB> 0.8.7 or cvs?
<foser> 0.8.7
<BBB> right, ok, I should've known, but I think it's a bug in clock distribution
<BBB> there was a hack in playbin and we removed that because we recently fixed
that bug in core

The hack in question is
http://freedesktop.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/gstreamer/gst-plugins/gst/playback/gstplaybasebin.c?r1=1.31&r2=1.32
.