When I was trying to watch a live streaming, VLC only burped once and no more audio output. The Message dialog spat lots of warning messages:
main warning: audio drift is too big (170368), dropping buffer
main warning: audio drift is too big (147148), dropping buffer
main warning: audio drift is too big (134086), dropping buffer
main warning: output date isn't PTS date, requesting resampling (1536590)
VLC can play other media files normally with default preferences, but not with that live streaming. I searched for the error message and read something about changing audio output module to OSS. Before I tried to re-emerge VLC with pulseaudio USE flag, I changed
  • Audio Output Module from Default to ALSA audio output.
Still no luck with it. At this moment, I had issued re-emerge command for PulseAudio support in VLC, while waiting, I made another change for ALSA audio output's settings
  • Audio Device from Default to HDA Intel: STAC92xx Analog (hw:0,0).
That fixes the problem. Somehow the Default audio device would cause the "audio drift too big..., dropping buffer" error. By specifying the device resolving the issue, I have no clue why this didn't happen on other regular media files.
The live streaming is GOMTV, a stream of GSL, a StarCraft II tournament. Watching GSL requires a Windows-only custom media player. I found a Python script, GOMstreamer, which can extract the streaming URL and feed stream data to VLC automatically using just one command.

I installed VLC just for watching this stream because GOMstreamer only officially supports playing using VLC. I am sure you can play it using MPlayer, but I haven't tried to know what exactly behind the scene. Since VLC also uses Qt as SMPlayer does, so I might keep it on my disk for a while. The interface is quite nice.

I don't know if the error is related to the presence of PulseAudio (PA). I have PA installed months ago, because I need to record the system audio output, my sound card does not provide such recording channel. That's how PA got into my computer, I generally do not want a second program does the same things as ALSA has already taken care all tasks except the recording need.
After the installation of PA, I honestly didn't feel much difference than before as in performance and memory consumption. I kept PA around even I now have no need for recording.