Hi, I exchanged a few e-mails with James and I was impressed with his response time, as well as his efforts in running this forum. I promised to register, so here I am.
I've noticed from this thread that, using Gnome, individuals are occasionally unable to connect to the MDP server "bryston-bdp-1.local". Happened to me (error "12") and I came across the solution here - I put "bryston-bdp-1" (no ".local") and it all worked again, no need to use the IP address. It was working with ".local" in the past and I didn't change anything - worth a try if you get this problem.