Yes… I found a free Full HD player that can play my Panasonic HDC-SD700 1920×1080 50p m2ts files smoothly. The great free VLC Media Player cannot play those MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 1080 50p camcorder video files (playback is slow with hang here and there). It only can play smooth up to 25 fps video clips. However, the search is over. I found Splash Lite ~ the ultimate free HD player!
Splash Lite
Yeah… If you are StarCraft II gamer and having ATI graphics card, here is a beta driver for you. It supports Anti-Aliasing through the ATI Catalyst Control Center for StarCraft II. This beta driver supports ATI Radeon HD 2xxx, 3xxx, 4xxx and 5xxx series graphics card and ATI Radeon Mobility. It also improves performance for Quad ATI CrossFireX for Eyefinity supported configurations.
I updated the display driver to 10.7a beta. But my poor ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB cannot perform well even with 2x AA enabled. Getting less than 30 fps when turn AA on. I think that I need to upgrade to ATI Radeon HD 5870 in order to enable AA and play it smoothly. Anyway, StarCraft II is great to play even without AA turn on. 
Download ATI Catalyst 10.7a Beta Driver for StarCraft II here.
I love new video card driver. I used to update to the latest display driver when it came out. However, most of the enhancements do not support previous generation video card like ATI Radeon HD 4000 Series. Most of the enhancements are focused on current generation ~ ATI Radeon HD 5000 Series.
ATI Catalyst version 10.7 New Features
- ATI Eyefinity – HydraVision enhancements
- Enhanced Pull-down detection
- ATI CrossFireX technology – support for rotated displays
- ATI Radeon GPU acceleration of VLC 1.1.1 Media Player
Only 1 feature applicable on my Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 ~ Enables GPU acceleration of h.264 video content when using the VLC 1.1.1 Media Player – delivering a better user experience by consuming less system resources.
End result… No visible improvement on VLC 1.1.1 Media Player. It is still at 20% CPU processing power on the latest video display driver version 10.7 compare to previous version 10.6. Anyway, it is great upgrade for those uses ATI Eyefinity features…
Download ATI Catalyst version 10.7 here.
Yes. There is another great action game that you cannot miss ~ Batman Arkham Asylum. The game play and graphics are awesome. Even better than Resident Evil 5 in game play but I prefer Resident Evil 5 movie. Too bad that Nvidia marketing tactics disabled the MSAA setting for all the ATI 3D cards. I cannot turn on 4XAA in Batman Arkham Asylum with ATI Radeon HD 4870. Anyway, I don’t notice much on it during game play. So who care? Batman Arkham Asylum is still a great game. 
As usual, Microsoft makes this game work only with its XBOX 360 controller. So if you don’t have XBOX 360 controller, be sure to download XBOX 360 controller emulator to play Batman Arkham Asylum with your own gamepad.
Yeah… The wait is finally over. Here come the new 3D display card from AMD ~ ATI Radeon HD 5870. There are lot of ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review in the Internet now. I read through some of the reviews. The performance is really good ~ almost same as ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2. It is a good deal for new computer setup. However, I am not going to buy this ATI Radeon HD 5870 soon. But might get another Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB to enable CrossFireX when price go down. Nvidia GT300 will be released on Q1 2010. The price will be even lower then.
ATI Radeon HD 5870
Do check out AnandTech and Guru3D for ATI Radeon HD 5870 Review.
Really can’t wait to get my hand on another Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB. Want to play games on 1920×1200 with my latest LCD monitor ~ Dell UltraSharp U2410. It should be able to run smoothly at 60 fps on most of the games. 
