Hardware acceleration is now working fine in Power DVD but not in Splash.
The movie is very stuttering but most often the computer hang. Reset is the only way out.

Aha, ok you are right. I installed the old Catalyst drivers 7.10 and now hardware acceleration is available!
Thanks!

What's the hardware requirements for hardware acceleration?

For me Splash works better than VLC but CPU utilization is 100%.
In settings hardware accelaration is greyed out.

I have updated GPU drivers and Catalyst software.