If you still have the base-tar dist install, could you check whether the following helps...

Make sure /etc/localtime is linked to the correct /usr/share/zoneinfo/.../... file. As I', not entirely sure whether the player app uses this link when changing the timezone so it might be missing. And set the TZDIR environment variable to override the incorrect search path for timezone files.

Something like,

ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern /etc/localtime

export TZDIR=/usr/share/zoneinfo

date or ntpdate

If this works, we're one step closer to getting the clock right. If this works well I can easily add the setting of TZDIR to the empeg specific initialization in empeg_ui.c.