I wanted to add here that mplayer is not able to play live streams in a watchable way, and the reason is that the live streams are usually playlist m3u8 files with the video broken into small 5-10sec chunks. Although that mplayer is able to use this kind of file, it stops before it plays the next part, so you have a bad video playback experience.

This is happening on Linux as well. When I was experimenting and was searching if there is a way to overcome that behaviour, I didn't find a way, but I might miss something.

That's why ffplay is better to playback those video streams.