Wide-screen when hooked to a TV?

H

Harvey

Registered
As you may have noticed I have been using my powerbook to watch movies on a widescreen LCD TV recently. One more question in relation to that!

When I hook my laptop to the TV and just display the laptop desktop or some random app, it fills up the entire TV LCD display. However, when I put a DVD into "full screen mode" with VLC or Apple's DVD Player application, I get the black bars on the side of the TV LCD.

Is there anyway that I can get DVDs played on the TV to utilize the entire screen?

Thanks for any help.

- Harvey
 
Are the DVDs you're watching formatted in 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio? I guess what I'm asking is -- are those widescreen DVDs, or are they DVDs formatted for a non-widescreen TV?

Usually the DVD box will say something to the effect of "Fullscreen" or "Widescreen version." If they're "Fullscreen," that's why you're seeing black bars, and they are displaying normally... with a fullscreen-formatted DVD, you wouldn't want the image to take up the whole widescreen display because the picture would be distorted (it would be "stretched" side-to-side, making actors' heads and other things seem wider than they really are).
 
You're getting black bars on the sides because the movie you're watching is being presented in a 4x3 aspect ratio, instead of 16x9, the aspect ratio of your LCD TV. So, basically you're fitting a square movie onto a rectangular screen. The only thing you can really do is tell your television to stretch or zoom the image to fill the screen, but I don't recommend that because you'd be distorting the image.
 
Thanks! It was simply the particular DVDs I happened to be watching. Watched a newer one last night that was formatted for wide screen and everything worked fine. Thanks!
 
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