Comment 43 for bug 496616

John Baptist wrote >
"Are there any potential negative consequences to removing this package?"

Certainly there are -
the one clear consequence is that if you have a 5.1 setup and are using pulseaudio that while you will get 6 channel output the 5.1 channel mapping will be incorrect in gstreamer players

There are numerous 5.1 ac3 test files available - here's one
http://www.lynnemusic.com/surround.html

or just
wget http://www.lynnepublishing.com/surround/www_lynnemusic_com_surround_test.ac3

If you are not using 5.1 and experiencing pulse crashing with other formats this may resolve with no real consequence

The real purpose of removing the plugin in this bug report is to test and possibly point to the most likely culprit - the gstreamer pulseaudio plugin (gst-plugins-good ) and see if it resolves the issue for file types other than .ac3

John Baptist wrote >
"That is, is someone from gstreamer and/or PA willing to take responsibility for this"

Apparently not - the bug I posted against gst-plugins-good, linked in post # 37 has been ignored - if removing the plugin resolves for ac3 5.1 in a 5.1 setup then marking "..affects me.." would be good
(though it is specific to 5.1 output and .ac3 files