I am currently using a widescreen HD LCD TV as my TV/Computer Monitor and whenever i play a video (using Windows Media Player) from the computer there are black bars at the top and bottom of the video file, which means what i can see is the movie in the middle of the screen with black edges (thick ones). i have tried using TMPGEnc to remove these and all looked good, until i tried playing back one of the files, the same problem happens. when playing back in media player i notice that at the top and bottom of the video the black bars are (i don't really know how to explain properly) a little bit brighter. if anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated.
the best I can do is point you in a possible direction. I had the same problem viewing a movie on my HDTV. The side bars were put there by my video card (drivers), and the top and bottom were put there by my software player to keep the correct aspect ratio. What I ended up with was the movie playing in the center of my tv with black bars on all sides, and the top and side bars were of a differnt shade of black. The way I fixed my issue was select different settings with my video card driver until the side bars went away. Update to the latest driver, and try different settings and screen resolutions. Without knowing your hardware setup, that is as close to an answer as I can get you. I hope that helps a little anyway.
I just use gomplayer(free) on it you can press (ctrl+num8) and it will make the video taller or press(ctrl+num6) to make it wider to fill the screen. As far as removing the bars, it cannot be done because all videos are of different height/width(changing your display settings will work on some videos, but you will get bars on other videos. It's best to just fix it on your player. (maybe your player has a setting to "stretch to fit screen".
sweet. i just found that same thing in media player classic (from k-lite mega codecs pack). i just wish the program had an option to automatically do this. oh well, thanks for the help mate.
Anything with an AR greater than 1.78:1 will have black bars top/bottom. This is the way it is supposed to be. If you look around you will find a post where someone wants to physically add black bars to stop their player from stretching the video. So their problem, would be your solution... odd isn't it?
I guess my issue may have been different. I have a 65 inch wide screen HDTV with my computer connected directly to it via DVI. I had large dark black bars on the left and right, and when I played my wide screen movies, those black bars would stay, and my software player put more light colored black bars on top and bottom to keep the ratio correct. What I had was a movie that would have played fine on a 32 inch wide screen if it had NO black bars. The way I fixed it was just what I said in my above post. The driver was mainly at fault. Adding the black bars on the left and right side when they were not needed. I guess they didn't pick up that I was playing on a wide screen??? I updated the driver, and it fixed my issue. *edit* to be clear: I believe he is getting 4 black bars not 2. I re read everyones post, and I know 2 bars to keep ratio is correct (top/bottom) or (left/right) depending on the video, but I think his issue is the same as mine was. 4 bars and only a small % of the screen being used.
i found a solution, it was the players (windows media player 11 and media player classic) that were adding the bars to the top and bottom (though it's weird they would try to keep the aspect ratio by adding bars when i have a widescreen monitor) i am now using windows media center on Vista x64 with some divx codecs installed, and it works perfectly, the videos are fullscreen and all is good. (except that i still can't stream videos to my 360's media center so i can use my remote, lol.) but that's a problem for another day i think. thanks to all who helped.
