VLC 2.0 Final to Launch with a Brand New OS X UI This Week

Felix Kühne, one of the many developers maintaining VLC Player for Mac OS X, has confirmed in a blog post that the final version of the application is about to be released.

VLC 2.0 will include a native full-screen mode in OS X Lion, a redesigned subtitle manager, new video output modes, support for multiple video files inside RAR archives, and even support for Blu-ray titles.

The lua-based extensions are supported now, meaning users will be able to grab subtitles from the web automatically (without having to fire up a browser and search for them manually).

This is not exactly breaking news, as VLC 2.0 has been available for Mac OS X and Windows as a release candidate since January. Now, the development team is adding the final touches to the popular media playing application:

“Since the release of VLC 2.0 is approaching, I thought it was time to publish its final interface design by Damien Erambert,” writes Felix Kühne, who provides news from the Mac Port of VLC Media Player.

“Jean-Baptiste Kempf and me started to collect ideas for this interface in the summer of 2008. After slightly chaotic approaches and a few near death experiences for VLC's Mac OS X port, we're really proud of the result,” he says.

He adds that “VLC 2.0's interface for Mac is dramatically different from its previous revision, both technically and usage-wise,” and proceeds to tout some of the cool new features that make up VLC for Mac.

He reveals that he couldn’t have pulled all this off without a stipend from Google Inc. as part of Google Summer of Code 2011.

“VLC 2.0 will be available later this week on videolan.org,” Felix confirms. To see some of those screenshots, visit Felix here.