I have a friend with an Aspire and was curious about how well it performed with HD fansubs. I watched the first episode of a 720p/H.264 encode of
Nodame Cantabile (either the C1 or Anime-Keep version) after installing
smplayer for Windows. It had a bit of a problem with the OP because of its higher bit rate (all those flowing musical notes and such), but the show itself played fine.
Nodame probably isn't a good test if you're planning on watching shows with lots of on-screen action, but for many shows with relatively static backgrounds and limited motion, the Aspire should be fine.
Note that both smplayer and
mplayer, which does the actual heavy lifting, are entirely free. You might find you don't need CoreAVC at all.