Media Players
An overview of popular free media players with MMS support.
xine
Its libxine backend is used by several other media players. The xine frontend doesn't seem to be as widely used as its backend. Xine was the first media player to get MMS support, thanks to Major MMS' mms plugin for xine. Most other MMS implementations seem to be based on this plugin.
VLC
Probably the most widespread open-source media player. It has an excellent MMS implementation with the most functionality implemented. VLC's mms implementation differs from xine's and was either developed separately from the xine plugin, or has diverged substantially from it.
mplayer
Widely used on Linux. mplayer's MMS implementation seems to be based on the xine mms plugin, but hasn't been updated in a while and has stagnated somewhat.
libmms
Not a media player, but an attempt to unify the mms implementations for media players. It uses code extracted from the xine plugin. Interestingly, libmms is "liberated" with permission from the original authors and is made available under the LGPL license.
gstreamer
Basically a video system backend. It uses libmms for its MMS implementation.
mimms
Mimms is not a media player, but a program used to download MMS streams for later viewing. Its MMS implementation is based on libmms.
ffmpeg
An mms access module is currently being developed for ffmpeg and ffplay. It is a completely new reimplementation, based on the available documentation. ffplay is not widely used as a primary desktop video player, and will not be a focus of this project.
totem / kaffeine
Totem is the standard media player for the gnome desktop, and kaffeine is its counterpart for KDE. Both can be configured to use either libxine or gstreamer as backends. The integration of those two players into the common open source desktop system makes them important for the project. Thankfully they both use common backends which makes it easy to improve their mms implementations.