OK folks, I think I've established that my hardware is OK, that the issue appears to be with one of the plugins in gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad, and it's exposed by cheese.
Upstream for both cheese and gstreamer have long since moved away from the versions concerned, so any fix for this issue is of interest only to Debian. On that note, as much as it looks like a relatively "fun" bug to try and squash, I'd like to establish whether there's any likelyhood of a fix being accepted into squeeze, either as part of the release or in a point release, before I put more time into it. I guess that's only the case if the maintainer(s) think this qualifies as RC and the RMs agree. What do you think? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org