Need help with aspect ratio.

[Derek]

I've noticed on my laptop that on some widescreen DVDs, it fills the whole screen from left to right (with the black bars on the top and bottem of course) but on 2:35 aspect ratio the widescreen is smaller and theres black bars on the sides too. But it doesn't look like that on a regular DVD player, only on computers and laptops with DVD drives. I wouldn't mind except my regular DVD player is old and worn and is skipping on all my DVDs. my laptop is all i have now. but unfortunatle, my laptop can not show my 2:35 DVD movies the same way my reguler DVD player does. Is the a way i can fix that?

[2 of 3]

What Media Player are you using?

If you download GOMplayer and hit the full screen button, it will adjust the ratio automatically. It plays just about any file too which is nice.  VLC player is good too, but I can't seem to get that thing to stop taking over my computer. SO it's GOM for me. 

http://www.gomlab.com/eng/GMP_download.html

[Kylenz]

There are also tvs coming out now that have the correct cinema aspect ratio, and they look cool. The annoying thing with widescreen tvs is that you still get the black bars across the top & bottom even while watching a blu ray, so you have to go into the Zoom options and get rid of them that way (cropping off a portion of the sides in the process, but heck I HATE the black bars!

And yeah, I've seen what you mean by side bars too when watching on a pc, and it's doubly annoying. Not sure how to fix it, except go into your media player and play with the options.

[chris]

The annoying thing with widescreen tvs is that you still get the black bars across the top & bottom even while watching a blu ray, so you have to go into the Zoom options and get rid of them that way (cropping off a portion of the sides in the process, but heck I HATE the black bars!

gasp! no way. some movies are recorded in a 2:35 - 1 ratio and others are recorded in a 1:85 - 1 ratio. i would never mess with the director's intended vision by zooming in (and therefore cropping out) some of the picture. the black bars go unseen after just a few minutes, if the movie is any good, that is.

[Kylenz]

Oh well, I don't care so much about the director's vision, it's MY vision that matters  and those black bars are distracting! I always assume that anything 'off to the side' is irrelevant anyway!