Anybody have idea to deal with the black bar around the movie? There is black area at the top and bottom of screen when I play movies on my iPod. I download Handbrake to convert movies and set the ratio. But I am perplexed. Anyone give me some suggestion? Thanks!

Get the widescreen version of the movie then. A widescreen movie will play widescreen (no black bars) on a widescreen tv. Anything else, then get used to the black bars or stretch the picture using the picture format key on your tv's remote. Some TV's do it better than others , but it will always distort it.

Welcome to the forum. Hope it helps. Well, I can only hope, lol.

What I find annoying is when the show is filmed 16:9, then downgraded to 4x3
so it gains the bars top and bottom, then shown on an HD station in 16x9 so it gains black bars on the sides as well, always feel ripped of getting a 24" picture on a 32" TV..... 

Thanks, I'll have a try.

Yeap, the black bar is still on the side. Through Google search, I found some programs could crop this black bar, like, WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe, Handbrake, Media maker etc. But, I don't know whether they are good or suitable.

I know the feeling, my tv puts in grey bars BUT I have purchased a cheap DVD player that has a zoom feature, I just zoom out to a bigger picture, loss some edging but so what, simple without have to crop, resize in software. Otherwise I use "Total Video Converter" works well.

PS: The Dvd player is a Phillips DVP5140 was < $ 50 at Bestbuy a while ago, also plays avi files, pal and region code can be changed.

The black bars show up because your display doesn't have the same aspect ratio as the program.

The silliest example of this is wogster's, where the image is cropped first by the people making the disc, then by the TV. That's where ZOOM comes in -- a straight zoom should fill the screen on a 16:9 set.

However, a 2:35 shown on a 16:9 will have black bars at the top and bottom, too.

What do you want to do instead of those black bars? Those bars are there because, in order to show the entire width of the image in a manner where a photographed circle is shown as a circle, they have to be there.

You could zoom in so that the screen is filled vertically. This chops off the sides. If you could stretch the image vertically so the black bars are gone, every bicycle wheel and car wheel will look like an egg somehow rotating yet staying taller than wide. As suggested, you can get the fullscreen version, where someone else has already zoomed in and cropped the sides for you. These occasionally create the funny scene where two people are shown from the side across a table and you can only see their noses, as the rest of them is cropped out.

Any solution involves cropping or distorting the image.

What I find iritating is when this occurs on an HD channel, your watching a movie for example that was originally shot on 16:9, then the station uses a SD video copy that is letter box, giving the black bars top and bottom, then you watch it on a 16:9 TV that adds black bars on the sides.  If you have an HD TV on an HD channel, you effectively get half a picture in the middle of the TV.  With the number of HD sets being sold now, this is not acceptable.

Welcome to HDTV - the 4 by 3 ratio was good when our grand parents went to the movies... then came wide screen cinemas; finally wide screen TV.

Answers your questions.

[Link: hometheater.about.com]

There's a better website but I cant find it. Above explains the aspect ratio well.

The reasons for the black bars is well known, what is a question though is that when a station is broadcasting in HD, why the heck are they using ancient  copies of movies that were reformatted in SD, with mono sound, giving you the worst of all worlds, a tiny little low quality picture in the middle of your big high definition screen with cheesy low quality mono sound.  I guess it's because they have had that copy in the video library since they got it in 1973, and it would be expensive to replace. 

"I guess it's because they have had that copy in
the video library since they got it in 1973, and it
would be expensive to replace."

Heck, they might have received it last week. HD tape stock still isn't that cheap, and many broadcasters and content distributors have a lot of infrastructure and supply devoted to Digital Betacam. Independent broadcasters and small-market affiliates may not be hauling in that much money via advertising or, in the US, carriage fees, so it's probably cheaper to order the SD version. Even pay specialty channels will do this to save some money for more programming, maintenance, and upgrades, etc. It will take time for a lot of the old stuff to clear out of the system; until then, this will be a problem.

They could buy a decent piece of format converting gear (we have one at work), but again... money :)

Well, CBC at least always upconverted their widescreen SD material to fill the screen. Haven't seen them have to do that for a while now, but back when they first started they were showing a lot of movies, the new Doctor Who and so forth. Most of it looked at least as good as a DVD would have.

I should note that the majority of SD masters we received were in 4:3 full frame, usually for OTA or pay TV carriers. Letterboxed content was rare, anamorphic extremely rare.

Technologically, CBC national is about as good as it gets. I'm pretty sure Little Big Man, which aired a couple of nights ago, was upconverted, and still looked quite good.

This reminds me of the early days of the Philips [12 inch] Laserdisc format, on
alt.video.laserdisc(still active)in Usenet we had one noob always complaining about the top and bottom black bars, we had a hell of a time telling him that was a release showing how the movie was originally filmed. Plus if you were buying, you had to watch the serial/product numbers because many titles were both Pan & Scan to fill 4:3 TVs or Widescreen and best for larger tubes or projection sets.

My 130s have the zoom feature and last night's 'CBC Late Night Movie' required the use of the zoom but fills the 16:10[not 16:9] of the Acer Computer monitor without cropping but they recently screwed up the latest airing of "Little Big Man" because the wide image had to be zoomed[reducing the bars to top and bottom instead of all around] whereas the previous broadcast of it was 'native', i.e. not needing any zoom.