Popular media player VLC is about to reach version 2.0 final and Felix Kühne, current lead developer of VLC’s Mac OS X port, has posted a series of screenshots detailing the final user interface design that we’ll see in the 2.0 update once it goes public “later this week”. The screenshots, available over at Kühne’s blog, show a dramatic change from VLC’s current design on the Mac, with a new sidebar for your playlists, Internet sources, and media on your computer and local network. The new design was created by Damien Erambert, and the first concepts date back to 2008. The interface of VLC 2.0 for Mac will offer a series of advantages over the older version from a functionality standpoint as well:

VLC 2.0’s interface for Mac is dramatically different from its previous revision, both technically and usage-wise. Playlist and video output share the same window, service discovery modules can be easily accessed through a sidebar and various audio + video filters are available through the respective panels. Besides that, the interface is noticeably faster and easily expandable. Speaking of that, we also added support for VLC’s lua-based extensions, which allow you to get info about the current movie from Allociné, post to Twitter, fetch subtitles automatically, etc.

Previously known as VLC 1.2, VLC 2.0 is a major rewrite of the application, which now includes several bug fixes, new features, and a redesigned interface. Alongside improved performances and optimizations for Lion, VLC 2.0 comes with many new features including initial support for Blu-Ray Discs, new subtitle management and blending in video outputs, support for multiple files inside RAR archives, and an all-new 64-bit version for Windows users (VLC 2.0 for Windows won’t feature a new interface as seen on OS X). A complete list of changes from VLC 1.x to VLC 2.0 is available here; the developers didn’t mention anything specific about the “mobile port” for iOS and Android devices.

VLC 2.0 will be available later this week at VideoLAN’s website. More screenshots of the final Mac UI have been posted on Flickr.