Question regarding black bars on widescreen -

[kyle]

I have a 46" Samsung that I am currently running Connect360 to. I am not sure the technical term, so I apologize in advance.

When viewing a movie through xbox, the black bars seem to be unusually large. I am wondering if I pick up an Apple Tv if that will be corrected. If so I will seriously go buy one today. When I stick my hand to it the bar is almost as a big as my hand. I took a piss poor pic with my cell phone to show you folks....



It's frustrating having a good size tv and not being able to take advantage of it. Your help will be appreciated.

[Pleiades]

The big question is -- what aspect ratio is the video you're viewing? Those black bars may indeed be correct for that particular video.

Are there black bars on the side too?
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[kyle]

These movies are "widescreen" that been ripped. I guess I should look into it more. The bars are only on the top and bottom. Maybe they are correct, I think it's a bit annoying though..

[Pleiades]

[kyle]

I understand that they will be there as an aspect ratio. I was going through my collection and The Illusionist had bars that were around an inch. So that was great, now I need to look what was different about that movie...

I am trying to not stress to much about it...

[Pleiades]

The Illusionist was shot in 1.85:1, so that's close to a 16:9 screen's 1.77:1 ratio, hence the small black bars.

Something like Star Wars is a lot wider at 2.35:1, so it will create larger black bars on your screen to fit at its native aspect ratio.
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[miniconvert]

As usual, ClunkClunk is dead on. You're running into differences in aspect ratio and it is completely normal. You're not "losing" anything at all so you should do nothing. If you tell the TV to "fix" the non-issue by stretching or zooming then you will lose proper aspect ratio or you will miss out on some of the picture. 16:9 is the ratio that virtually all HDTV is done in so it's the obvious choice for TV manufacturers to target.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with your TV and there is nothing you should do. To "fix" it would actually be ruining the correctness of the film. This is an argument I've had people in the past who were so against the black bars they see on their 4:3 TV that they'd go buy the non-widescreen version of a movie. They thought that the bars meant they weren't seeing the whole image when in reality this isn't true. There are a few examples where this isn't true but they are far and few between.

You can read a lot more about it over here

http://www.reelclassics.com/Techtalk/panscan-article.htm
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[garrett222]

ok we get that it screws stuff up, but if we're okay with that and we're trying to avoid burn in on our plasma or crt rear projection tv, then is there a way to make the bars go away?

[miniconvert]