We know that the iPad is (mostly) great for video playback, if you buy your movies and TV shows from iTunes or go through the trouble of converting non-Apple-supported formats. But what if there were a pain-free way to play almost every type of video format? Thanks to VLC for the iPad, there is.

VLC is a port of the popular and excellent desktop application. The open-source project is famous for its versatility in supporting a ton of media formats and playing high-quality video files that would make lesser applications choke. Romain Goyet, the CTO of the developer behind the app, Applidium, was kind enough to send the final version to me for testing.

The first iPad version of VLC is simpler than the desktop version, and quite a lot prettier. To get movies into the playlist, you drag them into iTunes, just like adding files to any other app. You can't add folders, but you can drag in pretty much any kind of file. Some files may cause the app to crash on launch, and the only way to find out is to remove them one at a time.

Fire it up and you get the above view. The app can take a few moments to generate thumbnails of your clips, and it presents them in a nice looking grid, which you can scroll. In addition to the thumbnails, you get the file name, the length of the movie and its on-screen size. HD movies get badged as such, and if you have watched a clip partway through, a little pie-shaped progress indicator is overlaid onto the icon.

To play a movie, just touch it. If VLC thinks your iPad might not be up to the task, it will ask if you want to try anyway. I did with one short 1280 x 720 clip, and all I got was sound.

Not all file formats are supported: The AVCHD files from my Panasonic GF1, for example, can be added via iTunes but don't appear in the app. Subtitles, though, do work. Just make sure the SRT file has the same name as the movie file and drop it into iTunes alongside the movie. It works great (although you can't turn them off from within the app).

Sometimes the video starts to break up, and sometimes the sound gets out of sync. The former usually fixes itself and the latter can be cured by quitting and relaunching VLC. This is no hardship as the app remembers where you left off.

There are a few other iPad apps that will play AVI and DIVX files, among other formats, but VLC plays files that the others wouldn't even open. And so far it appears not to drain the battery significantly more than the iPad's hardware-assisted video player (VLC uses software decoders for much of its work). I'm 15 minutes into Truffaut's 400 Blows and the battery is still at 100 percent.

The one big thing I miss is the volume boost of desktop VLC. ITunes on both the Mac and the iPad have whisperingly low maximum volume settings, whereas sound in VLC on the Mac comes out loud and clear, but not on the iPad version. That said, this is v1.0 and is way more polished than any other video app I have yet seen on the tablet.

The best part of all this is that VLC for iPad will be free when (and if) it makes it through the app review process and into the store.

Update: Romain wrote to make a few points. First, the crash-on-launch problem is known, and will be fixed in the next update. Second, the reason my MTS files don't show up in the app is because VLC recognizes videos by file extension. Adding this one in should make things work. And third, volume boost is coming. Great news!

VLC for iPad [Applidium. Thanks, Romain!]

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