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When it comes to watching movies and TV shows on the iPad, there’s a huge amount of content available. However, most of it needs to be converted from something to one of the officially supported formats — .m4v, .mp4, and .mov — before you can watch it. Now, one of the most common formats on the interwebs, AVI, can be played on your iPad using a free app.

To call CineXPlayer (iTunes, free) a godsend is a bit of an understatement. The promise here is that you can download AVI format videos straight from the web and play them back unaltered on your iPad.

The interesting bit, the glue that makes it work, is that AVI is already a supported format on the iPad. How else would it be possible to install an app and then start watching in the space of a minute or 10?

Does CineXPlayer deliver?

I’ve only tried two movies and a TV show with the occasional stretch of either frozen video or audio. Getting back in sync sometimes required a few seconds of patience, or simply stopping and starting playback.

There was also a very strange crash where the screen went black, though pressing the home button and sliding to unlock brought the video back to exactly where it left off — good recovery.

Scrubbing through video is very responsive, instantaneous really and faster than my 2007 iMac. Nice.

Adding and deleting videos is easy. How long it takes depends on the size of the file, though there’s no conversion required.

And, it’s free

Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but pretty darned good. Here’s hoping they add more file formats soon and pour some gasoline on the fire.

So, Kudos to NXP Software, creators of CineXPlayer, and Apple for showing vision in approving it. Seriously, you need to get this app…

What’s your take?