Why black borders on Monitor playing DVD movie

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degreaser

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Jun 12, 2013
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Why does my screen have a big black border on both the left and right sides of my monitor when I play my DVD movie? The movie I am playing is Along in the Wilderness, he builds a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness and lives alone there for 35 years.

My display monitor is Benq GL2030 20" DVI at 1600x900 resolution 16:9 ratio. Windows 7 64 bit Home Premium edition, video graphics card is Nvidia Geforce 9400GT 512MB, max. resolution 2560x1600. I am using DVI-D dual link cable video card to monitor. I tried using Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player, but both of them give the black borders.

I was researching the Dell 27" U2713HM 2560x1440, would that monitor size and type be better for watching my DVD movies without black borders?
 
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SuperMAC4Ever

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Jun 17, 2013
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Perhaps the movie's aspect ratio is 4:3?
 
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catswold

catswold

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Some films are released with borders around them. The original release of Star Wars (before Lucas screwed it up) was released in 16 X 9, but it shows centered and only uses about a third of the total monitor space (still better than the reissue).

I would say first check out several other DVDs and see if they all do the same thing.
 
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jaguarskx

jaguarskx

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A widescreen monitor is 16:9 (1600,x900, 1920x1080, 2560x1440) or 16:10 (1920x1200, 2560x1600) aspect ratio.

However, movies / videos are filmed in many different formats and if it is not reformatted (cut) to fit 16:9 aspect ratio, then you will have black borders; either left/right or top/bottom.

For example, Batman: The Dark Knight was filmed in two aspect ratios. Some scenes were filmed at 16:9 others were filmed at 2.35:1. Therefore when watching the film some scenes fill the entire screen (16:9), while others will have black bars on top and bottom (2.35:1). To the best of my knowledge, Ben Hur was filmed at 2.76 aspect ratio, the widest aspect ratio ever used for a theatrical release. If the DVD / Blu-Ray version did not crop the film to make it 16:9 then it would have even thicker black bar top/bottom than the 2.35:1 aspect ratio scenes in Batman: The Dark Knight.


On a 16:9 aspect ratio monitor:

Watching movies of less than 16:9 aspect ratio (like 4:3) will mean black bars left/right.

Watching movies of greater than 16:9 aspect ratio (like 2.35:1) will mean black bars top/bottom.
 
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degreaser

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I tried 4 more of my DVD movies, Wild Hogs has black borders on both left and right sides, Unforgiven has black borders on the top and bottom, and another DVD the passion has the borders on the sides. Then I tried Republic of Doyle DVD and no borders anywhere on screen. So you are right it must be the DVD source disc that is doing the borders.
 
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jaguarskx

jaguarskx

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Watching DVD movies on high resolution monitors will make the video quality look worse. The larger the difference in the resolution of the movie/video the worse the video quality will be. This is due to something called image interpolation which more or less estimates where to place pixels on the screen because all you are doing is stretching the video to fit the screen.

An analogy would be to stretch a hand knitted blanket. The more you stretch it the further apart the yarn would be stretch and you begin to see holes in the blanket because all the yarn is being stretched apart from each other.

DVD is basically 720p and for argument sake just say that the resolution is 1280x720. DVDs may look okay on a 1600x900 resolution monitor because the movie itself is not stretched too much. But watching on a 1920x1080 / 1920x1200 the movie will not look as sharp as on a 1600x900 monitor. This is due to image interpolation. On a 2560x1440 monitor it will look even works because the DVD movie will be stretch to 2x the resolution. You should start looking into building a Blu-Ray collection since movies are basically at 1080p resolution so stretching that to 1440p will not look too bad.
 
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jaguarskx

jaguarskx

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As I stated, it is due to the aspect ratio of the movie.
 
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manofchalk

manofchalk

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Copied from the Monitor Guide linked in my sig.

Aspect Ratio
The Aspect Ratio is the ratio of horizontal to vertical pixels. You might notice on older films and TV shows that there are two black vertical bars on either side of the image when you watch it on your modern TV, this is because the standard Aspect Ratio was 4:3, meaning that the image is roughly square shaped. Since then, 16:9 has become the standard Aspect Ratio, leading to the widescreen, rectangular images and monitors we see today.
Click to expand...

And this is what Jaguarskx was referring too with stretching the image.

images
 
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degreaser

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If I am going to get a Blu-ray movie collection, maybe it would be better to invest in a 1080 resolution monitor, like a 1920x1080, I have a 20 inch and I think the new 24 inch 16:9 ratio monitors are 1920x1080, maybe that would be a better monitor for movies, what do you think?
 
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jaguarskx

jaguarskx

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Blu-Ray movies will look better on a 1920x1080 resolution monitor than a 2560x1440 resolution monitor because on the 1440p monitor the movie will need to be stretched if you want it to fill the entire screen. Thus, you would need to deal with a bit of image interpolation as I explained above. It would be similar to watch DVD movies on a 1600x900 monitor.

The benefits of a 1440p monitor should not be discounted though if you tend to do a lot of multitasking with lots of programs, windows open. If working with spreadsheets, you can see a lot of data (cells) on the screen at a single time without having to scroll around; assuming it is a large spreadsheet.

For a purely multimedia monitor though you are better off with a 1080p monitor if video quality is of the utmost importance.
 
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