You also need to include the fact that the Falcon Player is not really all that different than the PC. While it may handle more than 64000 channels, it DOES NOT have the ability to directly control anything. It, like the PC, still needs to be connected to some type of dongle to output to the controllers such as an ETD, a USB dongle, or the Falcon Controller.
Hooking it up is not all that big of a deal. The ETD is an E1.31 device and uses Ethernet to connect it to the PC running the show. The issue is that most implementations of E1.31 is a multicast protocol which means that the packets will flood your network since switches will need to send these packets to all ports on the switch. You can get around this by either directly connecting the PC to the ETD or getting low cost 10/100 switch and creating a separate network for the controlling the PC and ETD(s). The connection between the ETD and the controllers is NOT Ethernet. It uses the same wiring as would be used between the USB dongle and the controllers. As already said, the ETD puts out 4 PixelNet universes, 1 on each of the 4 pairs of wire in the Cat5 cable and the hubs and Zeus have jumpers to select which universe it is working with.