Splash 2.0 is a free (Shareware) HD Video Player for PC specifically optimised and designed for HD playback. Splash 2.0, according to its creators, will let you enjoy your videos and media like never before, with smooth motion, crisp high details and vividly gorgeous colors.

Well, we won’t make a judgement on that; beauty is after all in the eye of the beholder. What we can say though, is that Splash is simple to install, compact in size, and easy to use and master. For those in the know, it also supports hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding.

It’s more than just a straightforward video player however.

As well as letting you experience high quality video, it can also be used to export videos to most popular devices and websites such as YouTube and Facebook, which is nice.

A nice feature are the predefined profiles for the most popular formats, devices and social media websites. Yay, etc. Another nice touch we particularly liked was the Video frame preview during the export process. Splash 2.0 also has automatic de-interlacing. (This last point won’t mean much to most people: Don’t worry about it if it doesn't. You can still use it to watch HD video, and upload to YouTube.)

Supported file types for video playback include: avi, divx, m4v, mkv, mov, m2ts, mts, m2t, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpg, ts, vob, wmv, xvid, mp3, aac, and m4a.

Exporting features:

• High quality scaling.
• Hardware accelerated video encoding support with Intel® Quick Sync Video and NVIDIA® CUDA™, NVIDIA® NVENC and AMD APP.
• Hardware accelerated video decoding for exporting process with Intel® Clear Video, NVIDIA® PureVideo® HD, AMD UVD and Broadcom Crystal HD.

Overall, Splash 2.0 should appeal to people who like a video player that plays high quality HD videos, that is simple to use, supports pretty much any format you can throw at it, and looks good. But it should also find a home for those who like to format video for uploading to websites or transferring video to other hardware devices and want it to play without any fuss.

It’s also Shareware, which means it’s free as long as you don’t try to sell it on or make personal monetary gain.