Is it possible to make it yield between refreshes though? It uses 100% CPU whenever I run it and on my laptop all of the fans suddenly kick in.

It does yield between refreshes. This is talked about in the readme file. Check what it has to say there, first.

sometimes when I'm dragging the empeg or remote around the image jitters.

Yeah, I can't really do anything about that, it's the video driver. The same thing would happen on other programs if you activated the "show window contents while dragging" feature of Windows.