I used pactl to exit PA and then had VLC use ALSA directly. Voila! No more choppy video/audio. This is really too bad, I was just getting the hang of this PA stuff. Is there anything I could try to speed up PA and/or make it use fewer resources? The machine is a 3ghz Celeron 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.i686 w/ 1GB RAM.