How to play the streams in VLC player.

Choose the Media tab, choose Open Network and fill in the url of the stream in the address field.

In the left field choose a stream protocol that corresponds with your stream url (protocol field).
If you do not know the protocol, look at the first part of the stream url. This should be MMS://, HTTP:// or RTSP:// and so forth.

A keyboard shortcut for opening the network stream window is the control and n key. Like so: ctrl+n.

Download the latest VLC player: www.videolan.org

RTSP - Protocol stands for Real Time Streaming Protocol
MMS - Protocol stands for Microsoft Media Server.
URL - The address of a web page/stream on the world wide web known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

Starting from VLC 0.9.0 (2007), you can also stream flash with VLC - meaning the extension .flv.