16:9 appearing as 4:3 signal from DVD player

Alright, so I just bought a new TV and was having some trouble getting it setup.

The TV is an LG 42LH30 (that's 42" fore those who care about such things). It's a nice TV but I bumped into a bit of trouble when watching a widescreen DVD.

I've tried a couple of DVD players (yes I have a couple laying around) and noticed that when setting a DVD player to send a 16:9 signal, the television invariably detects it as a 4:3 signal with black bars top and bottom. The difference between setting the DVD player to 16:9 instead of 4:3 is just that the emply black bars get slightly smaller.

I have been hooking the DVD players up using RCA cables.

My questions are thus:

1) Is there any way to elliminate these black bars entirely? (Idealy have the TV detect the 16:9 signal as actually being 16:9)?

2) Would using Component Video cables make any difference? (Either to picture quality or to my current issue widescreen issue... and yes I know it's still only 480i picture on a 1080p TV).