I noticed somewhat jerky playback for quite a few of my videos and eventually bisected it down to the following commit (introduced between 1.2.1 and 1.2.2):

commit f2d11ffaffb941363f042ef703e4ceeaf51557e1
Author: Mark Nauwelaerts <mnauw@users.sourceforge.net>
Date:   Tue Nov 26 20:57:37 2013 +0100

    avviddec: discard unused input frames
    
    ... to avoid these piling up in list of pending frames.
    
    Fixes https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693772


I have uploaded the video at: http://rossl.org/junk/gstreamer/clip1.avi

To reproduce the problem, compare the first 8 seconds of video playback with gst-launch (or gst-play), avplay, ffplay and vlc. Only with gst-launch, the video is slightly jerky. The effect is relatively subtle but noticeable enough that I need to now use vlc to watch many videos.


Secondly, I have the same video but truncated, and this plays jerkily regardless of the version of gstreamer yet plays fine in avplay, ffplay and vlc. This video is at: http://rossl.org/junk/gstreamer/clip2.avi

Note that this occurs on multiple machines and environments.

Thanks for taking a look.