Black rectangle blocking view

Movies that are created for "Wide Screen" viewing show up in letterbox on your TV. If you go to a theatre you notice it is a big rectangle. To be able to fit all of the widescreen movie on a TV it has to make the height smaller.


Because many people want to see the "complete" Movie, the "Letterbox Format" came about. I do NOT know what the word "Letterbox" actually means, or how that term was chosen. To get the complete Rectangle into that Square, they discovered that they could shrink the entire rectangle to fit that square. Meaning, what used to take 2 inches on your screen, now may only take 1.75 inches. Now a problem arrose. When you shrink the WIDTH to fit your dinky Square of a TV, the HEIGHT also has to be shrunk along with it, or else you're stretching the image as if it was on silly-putty ("Compression"). When the image was shrunk to fit the TV Screen, they were left with a gap at the top and bottom of the screen. So they simply fill it in with "Black". I guess the only alternative was to leave it snowy.

Yes! you are right, this almost sounds like a captions problem, check the DVD/VCR Combo menu, if it has captions turn it off using your remote.

You need to turn closed captioning settings to none or off
on your video settings for the TV

This happens all the time, on your remote, go into the Menu and disable Closed Captions. It will go away after that.

Are you referring to the black bars that show above and below the movie? That's normal, it's called widescreen aspect ratio.

If you don't like that, you want to buy/rent fullscreen movies.

Widescreen is 6:9, fullscreen is 4:3. (Square versus rectangle)

Hello! I have a 32" Vizio LCD...within 30 minutes of the tv being turned on, black lines start running through the bottom half of the screen and eventually blacking out the bottom half of the tv screen. It also doesn't have anything to do with the ratio as I have tried that. HELP!

I signed up for the "chat" and the problem was solved very quickly. Thank you - great service!

I'm guessing its the "CC", closed captioning. You have to turn it off, it's either in your menu or you have a button the remote saying either, Text or CC.

Had the same problem but was able to fix it by simply doing the following:
"this is closed captions turned on your TV. get your original TV remote and look for a button that says "Captions" or "CC", and keep pressing it until the TV says "Off". if it doen't have one of those buttons, you will need to get into the menu of the TV and turn off closed captions there. It is probably set on "Text1 or Text 2" right now, and it needs to be set on "Off"

Good for you!! CONGRADULATIONS