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Many CQC customers will use hardware based media players, but it's become more and more common to use software based players as well. There are a number of reasons for this. For instance, if you have a computer in each room already, it's very convenient for those computer users to be able to access you media server and play back media locally. Another is for affordable multi-zone audio, in which a multi-output audio card is used in conjunction with multiple instances of a software player, out through a multi-zone amplifier and/or switcher. Also, software players are very amenable to use with disk based media files, which are becoming much more common now.
There are two basic scenarios for software players. One is to use one of the standard commercial players that we support, e.g. Zoom Player or TheaterTek. Some people may prefer this for various reasons. The other is to use our own embedded audio player, which has many advantages of its own. Note that our player is an audio-only player, so if movie content is involved some other player would be required, even if our player is used for audio.
The difference between our player and the Zoom/TheaterTek scenario is that our player is headless, meaning it has no GUI. Zoom Player and TheaterTek are standard players that are intended to be used on their own, and they just happen to provide a control interface that allows CQC to control them. However, since they are standard players, they must be running before they are of use, which means someone must be logged onto the machine and one or more instances of these players have to be started up.
That's reasonable for the scenario where you want local playback. But for a multi-zone audio scenario, where the playback is happening on a central computer and being pushed out to a multi-zone audio system, that's not really desirable, because you don't want to have to have that machine always having someone logged in, or to affect multi-zone audio if you have to log out for some reason. Our player runs directly within the driver, in the background under the CQC Service, so it's always there, whether anyone is logged in or not.
One reason you may choose to use a player other than ours is that you have special needs, such as file formats our player doesn't handle. Our player supports two audio engines, DirectShow or QuickTime. The former should support anything for which there is a DirectShow filter installed on the local machine. The later will handle whatever formats QuickTime is configured for on that machine. However, in either case, you may have some special format needs and would require some other player. You may choose to use it for all your playback needs, or in conjunction with our player for the more common case playback needs.
If you use iTunes (via our iTunes repository driver), and you download DRM'd material, then you must use the QuickTime engine and you must have iTunes installed and authorized on each machine where you want to do playback. Otherwise, the DirectShow engine is preferable since it's more likely to be stable and uses the fewest resources. The DirectShow engine can play unprotected iTunes MP4 files if you install the correct DirectShow filter for that.