One of the most asked questions is in regards of black borders on the video, and how to get rid of them.

The DVD standard specifies a fixed screen resolution for movies. This still comes from the time that wide-screen TVs were not common, so when widescreen movies became more popular, black padding was added to widescreen movies to make them still compliant with the DVD specifications. Most DVD players (devices as well as programs) are designed to ignore the black padding added to the video, but for video files this is not the case.

Example:

If we convert this movie without removing the black borders, the conversion, as well as the video player will treat the black borders as part of the actual video part, so when we play this on a device, the video will appear similar to this:

If we remove the black borders from the video (DVD Catalyst’s defaults) the video will look like this:

When we view this on the device, it will look like this:

No difference, right? It still shows black borders., even though the video itself does not have them. This is because the player adds them by itself when the video does not fill the screen.

So, how do you get rid of these borders completely?

Method 1: Crop/Cut. “Remove Black Bars from Device. This will remove the black borders as shown above AND remove parts of the sides to make it fit.

Full screen video, looks great. But what did we lose?

Original

Cropped

About half the movie is gone because we made it full-screen. Of course this differs per device, resolution and movie width, but still, it’s a considerable difference.

Second method, Stretch or as some people like to call it, Anamorphic.

This basically removes the black borders as in our first example, but then it stretches the video to make it full screen.

Original

Stretched

We still have the full movie, but everything looks a bit stretched.

So, the reason why DVD Catalyst uses “Remove black bars from file” as a default setting is because most video players have a Zoom function. With this, you actually have a choice during playback to select how you want the video to appear on screen. With the cropping/stretch methods, you make this choice during conversion, so there is no way to revert back to the original view of the video.

Just tap the zoom option in your player, and you can switch from

To

And back again while watching the video.