So I moved. Large new house, fancy new kitchen and bathroom, separate sleeping room, two televisions (one in the sleeping room) and two luxeous couches and ... no internet yet. Argh!
Insanity:
Havoc, yes, that is ALSA fault. there's no sane way to fix that in userspace apart from a large database of device-specific settings. And that's exactly why we need a generic kernel-/userspace interface: a generic way of controlling bery different devices.
If their default is unusable, then ALSA failed. After a new install, users will have to configure their sound card once in order to work. I don't know how to fix it apart from blaming the ALSA people.
Note that, all the lame ALSA disclaimers aside, OSS worked just fine in this respect. If we're going to fix it, let's just admit that ALSA is at fault and fix ALSA.
Media playback:
Current CVS of GStreamer has OGM support. Some autoplugging funkiness pending. Will now work on improving Matroska support, fixing AVI A/V sync issues and error+tagging forwarding.