For some reason, when I play widescreen DVD's on my 15.4" Widescreen laptop, there are still bars on the bottom and the top. I am using WinDVD 5. Is there something I am doing wrong, or do I need to get different software?

Nothing's wrong with your laptop.

Your "widescreen" on the laptop is most likely 16x9. That's a ratio of 1.77:1, right?

Now think about it - most DVD's are NOT in this ratio. Many are 1.83:1 or 1.85:1, some are 2.35:1, etc. Of COURSE you'll still see bars on the top and bottom. Just not as BIG as they would be on your TV.

Hope this helps? Here are some images to help you:

http://www.hypermaths.org/quadibloc/other/aspint.htm

Is there software that can make the movie fill the entire screen?

are you aware there is windvd 7 alredy? , anyway when in windvd right click it and click "setup" that will get you to the "perferences" tab there should be a checkbox down called "widescreen monitor" it might sort it out and if not in windvd 6/7 gold/platinium versions there is a feature called "smart stretch" that i think might help,heres the description of it:

From time to time people have to watch videos on a display device that has different width/height ratio than original aspect ratio of videos, such as watching a 4x3 DVD on a wide screen TV or a 16x9 movie on an ordinary TV. In these scenarios, it will stretch, or squeeze, video to the size of screen without changing the look of the center of interest

You CAN stretch it. It will always look a bit goofy, though. People will be too tall, or else there will be some clipping.

Jettman you stated in your original post that your laptop IS a "widescreen" screen.

IF you are correct, then you should understand that so-called widescreen films come in several aspect ratios, or shapes. SOME of these widescreen movies would perfectly match a widescreen laptop screen (those that are 1.78:1). But, a lot of other movies are much wider than that, and will not fill your widescreen laptop, unless you used software to stretch, or alter the shape, or zoom in, or crop.

There is software that can do all of that, of course. And, you can also complicate this by altering the display settings of Windows so that images will be chopped, or cropped.

So, to understand all of the issues, I recommend you first do a bit of quick research on the aspect ratios of films. Those who have just bought widescreen TVs are often confused when they put in a copy of "Lord of the Rings," and wonder why they still have black bars. That is because "Lord of the Rings" was shot in a "wider" aspect ratio. Then, they pop in a DVD of Jurassic Park, and for some reason it fills the entire screen, or at least it seems to. That is because Jurassic Park was shot in an aspect ratio that almost exactly matches a widescreen TV (or a widescreen laptop).

There are lots of guides to help you understand this. Here is a link to one I created:

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/ide...?topicID=20777

Now, once we have that issue settled, then we can deal with the fact that SOME of the DVD playing software on computers have display options that allow you to adjust the image shape. The choices usually come down to one or more of the following:

-Stretching the entire image, so it fills your screen
-Stretching the outer edges of the picture, but leaving the middle unstretched.
-Stretching the outer edges quite a bit, but stretching the middle parts only a little bit
-Cropping (also known as zooming). This option, of course, just blows up the image so that it is large enough to fill the entire screen, despite the fact that large sections at the outside edges are chopped right off, and not diplayed at all.

Unfortunately, I do not use WinDVD5, so I cannot tell you which options it may include.

Then, on top of that, it is possible to go into the display properties of the operating system (Windows, or Mac), and choose to enlarge whatever is displayed, so that edges are chopped off. Doing this, of course, means that everything else is also "zoomed and chopped," until you go and change it back.

Hope something here is of some help...

-Bruce

However, ALL of the methods Bruce mentions... distort or clip the original picture.