For that to work without a 'crossover' ethernet cable to a windows machine, both ends would need gigabit ethernet ports, which would be rare on most A/V equipment, unfortunately.
Auto-MDI/X is optional in the gigabit spec, but I have never seen a gigabit port that didn't support it.
A 'crossover cable' has one end wired TIA-568A and the other end wired TIA-568B (basically, the positions of the orange and green pairs are swapped). Otherwise, as you discovered, you need an ethernet switch (or another rarity nowadays - a "hub") to connect them. With a crossover cable, unless both ends support Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA - which uses the 169.254.x.x /8 address range), you would still need to set non-identical static IPs in the same subnet on both devices.
