The VideoLAN Forums

All players, like Windows Media Player or mplayer expect a MMS stream to be in form:

mms://server:1755

VLC expects additional "h" at the end:

mmsh://server:1755

As a result, no other player besides VLC can play such stream: "mmsh://server:1755". VLC won't play this link: mms://server:1755.

Why does VLC need "h" at the end of "mms" streams?

Because of this, it's impossible to put a piece of HTML code on a website and expect it to work with Windows (which uses Windows Media Player), and Linux (which can use VLC plugin in Mozilla/Firefox):

<embed type="application/x-mplayer2"
src="mms://server:1755"
width="320"
height="240"
autostart="1"
autoplay="1"
showcontrols="0"
controller="0">
</embed>

MMS can use 3 transport layers (or whatever they're called). Those can be TCP, UDP and HTTP. When you give a mms://... URL to VLC, it tries to autodetect which one is used. Unfortunately that sometimes fails (yeah, it'd be nice if we could fix it :p). So we came up with a work around which was to add the VLC specific aliases mmst://, mmsu:// and mmsh:// which force the transport layer.