Due to a relaxation of the app policy, iPads now have the ability to play a great deal more formats with the inclusion of a VLC Media Player app. The popular open-source software will permit iPad customers a gigantic variety of video formats not previously available to them. ReadWriteWeb reports,

With the free VLC app, iPad owners can now easily watch videos in a plethora of formats that Apple’s own built-in video player does not support. The team also plans to release an iPhone version of the app in the near future.

In our own brief tests, VLC performed very well and played all the AVI and DIVX files we threw at it.

I use VLC Player myself on my Windows PC and it’s a beautiful program that has a huge range of format capabilities. It certainly makes life easier having one program to go to when there’s so many different formats to choose from out across the Net and not all of them agree with Windows Media Player or Quicktime. Having a solid copy of this on an iPad will make surfing the Internet from an iPad an even better experience, especially when visiting sites that use open-source formats for video—assuming the app will build into the iPad’s browser.

iPads, however, still have some pending issues with transferring movies, forcing customers to go through iTunes and use Apple’s sync mechanism rather than allowing them to directly transfer the media files.

As iPad has been hailed as the center of personal media electronics, being large and mostly mobile at the same time, the inclusion of the VLC Player app will probably bring a huge boon to anyone who owns one. Especially with the number of people who movies stored in AVI and DIVX formats. Being able to actually watch those on the iPad will give publishers and distributors new license and avenues to reach willing customers. Plus, it’ll help unlock those particular files from being trapped only on users PCs where they would have had to languish while someone used their iPad in the past.

I am a huge proponent of being able to watch what I have, wherever I want to, so any technology that aids me and my neighbors to do that will go high on my list. VLC Media Player has been always been a part of every one of my default installs—and if/when I own an iPad, I’ll be adding it there. Now if only we could sync our libraries without having to go through iTunes, that’ll probably make it a killer app.

You can get the VLC app from the iTunes website.