If I leave xine using the 'alsa' plugin for audio output and try to play the 'GNU birthday' video (sf-large.ogv), I get garbled, skipping audio for the first few seconds of the piece. If I switch it to the 'pulseaudio' plugin, it always comes up with zero volume and I have to manually switch turn the volume up every time... so I've missed the first second or two of the audio for other reasons. Either way, I can't get to full volume unless I run gnome-alsamixer, because the 'front' ALSA control is not controllable from gnome-volume-control.
I tried to get output from 'pulseaudio -vvvvv' when the audio is garbled and out of sync at xine startup, but I don't seem to be able to reproduce it that way -- maybe it's partly to do with pulseaudio being autospawned when xine starts up?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 496281 ***