In this article, you'll find some pointers on listening/watching to live streams with certain software applications.

MPlayer

MPlayer is a very good application when it comes to live streams. It supports a whole deal of protocols, including those of windows (mms://).
The only "drawback" is that MPlayer by default sets its cache to 8MB. For video over LAN, this is not really an issue, but when listening to a low bitrate audio stream on the internet, it takes a long time to fill up that cache.

The easiest way to listen to a live stream:

mplayer -cache size-in-KB "stream-url (e.g. http://)"

Be sure to set cache size to something more sane:

• For low bitrate audio streams: 64 or 128, should be no more than 256, unless you want to wait.
• For higher bitrate audio streams: 128, 256. 512 is already pretty high.
• For video streams: depending on the stream; for low bitrate 1024 should suffice. Increase it for higher bitrates.

Note that these numbers are not "fixed". You can choose whatever you want. Make sure that you adjust the numbers if your internet/network connection has higher latency and suffers from hickups.

XMMS

More to come...