[Sony SZ160P] Videos play with black bars on all four sides

Brand new SZ160P. Wiped out the recovery partition and reinstalled minus all the **** (hopefully didn't leave out anything important). Things have been going well.

Until I installed the DivX player and tried to watch a DivX movie file. I figured that my nice wide screen would be great for watching wide screen movies, but unfortunately for some reason... any player I try will not extend the sides of the movie to the left and right sides of my screen when in fullscreen mode.

It's pretty ridiculous. Is there some trick that I am missing? No amount of screwing with video player options seems to do the trick.

Thanks!

 

it is probably how the movie is encoded....are you by any chance watching something that is subtitled? people might have added the borders so that it doesn't have overscan issues when people try to play it on tvs, cutting the subtitles off.

 

nah, it's not the files. they work great on my desktop machine.

I tried VLC media player, and it let me 'crop' to a certain aspect ratio (16:10) and it seems to look good now.

but i can't shake the feeling that something is wrong when every OTHER video player i've ever used can't handle it.

 

pete,
try this:
go to
control panel -->appearance and themes-->display-->settings-->advanced-->
nvidia control panel--> start nvidia control panel-->display-->appearance-->changeflat panel scaling-->in 2. choose use nvidia scaling and thenclick apply on the left of the screen
let me know how it goes

 

It really does sound like the files. Does your desktop machine have a widescreen monitor? Otherwise it's not really a good comparison to the SZ.

I have the same problem as you do on certain files but I can always "fix it" by using the widescreen options from the player. I don't know which players you've tried except VLC but WinDVD 7 has an extra option for widescreen usage. In media player classic there is a "pan & scan" option with which you can play.

 

Well... it is working properly now. It definitely was not the files; tried many different ones from many different 'mainstream' sources... the dimensions and aspect ratios of the videos confirmed that there are no black bars on the sides in the videos themselves.

I had tried all of the NVidia scaling options, and none of them seemed to have any effect. I installed VLC and 'cropped' to 16:10, which made my video files display properly. Awesome, but I prefer Winamp for the mousewheel volume.

So I tried it in Winamp, still busted.

I reboot. Winamp works fine. Windows Media Player works again too. DivX player as well. Saved!

I go back and check VLC to turn off the cropping feature, thinking that may have done it... and the cropping is turned off. All video playback works properly with the default settings in the players. WEIRD.

Anyways, I will probably re-investigate this problem the next time I wipe my laptop and start over. Maybe I'll be able to isolate exactly what fixes it.

Thanks for your help, guys!