cant get movies to display corretly on my 24" lcd monitor

ok after finally getting everything together, my pc, monitor, and logitech z-5500 speakers i popped in the lord of the rings (widescreen).. and right away into the movie i noticed 2 sets of black bars. First the ones that came with the movie and the others which looked like they belonged to the screen. Now im wondering what is causing this? is it the program i was using (windows media player (latest one.. 11 or something))

*my monitor is the 24" LG 245wp-bn

there could be a difference in aspect ratios. for example movies are in 16:9 ratio and my 22" is in 16:10 ratio and i get the same bars. there are different programs where you can select options and stretch the video to your aspect, but then again it will be stretched. do you know what the ratio is for your monitor?

How large are the bars total, about 2 inches each top and bottom? That's what I always get on my 24" with a true cinematic widescreen film. Widescreen cinematic aspect ratio is I think about 2.4 to 1 and the standard cinema ratio is about 1.85 to 1, in the US anyway. So on your monitor, assuming you do not alter the aspect ratio which will distort the image, you get bigger bars on the true widescreen films than you do on standard, which is much closer to a widescreen monitors aspect ratio. On those you get much smaller bars. You probably have a film which was widescreen at the cinema.

This is not to be confused with the 4 to 3 ratio which was TV only. Films appearing on a 4/3 tube are way altered of course to fit the screen. I'm talking about the two cinema standards in use today.

My bars are divided into two sets, one dark and one gray, but I only get this in the menus. They blend into total black when the movie starts. Though the total size is the same.

LOTR's widescreen aspect ratio is 2.35:1.

Since the aspect ratio of widescreen monitors is set to 16:10 you will get black bars on top and bottom so that the movie will be displayed in the correct aspect ratio.

Basically this means that at full screen the movie will be approximately 1920 x 817 if you work out the math.

If you have vertical black bars to the left and right, then you are having issues with Media Player. Personally, I use PowerDVD, but Windows Media Player Classic is a good simple freeware program to play back AVIs and DVDs which I use most of the time.