Options:

1) Use a wired LAN connection for your laptop when downloading.
2) Upgrade your wireless LAN equipment so that you get 11Mb/s to your laptop.
3) Use USB.
4) Run JEmpeg on your server, forwarding the X display to your laptop. Or, if your server is Micro$oft, use vnc.
5) Get the developers to completely rewrite an EOL piece of software to support an obscure scenario, thus reducing the already limited time that they have to fix and implement other (more) desirable stuff (eg. RDS, Ogg support etc).


Anyway, the improvement wouldn't be as great as you think - the empeg only has a 10Mb/s ethernet port.