Watching dvd's and movies on a Widescreen Laptop

[unstopabl3]

Hey i am new here and got a few questions. Please bare with me if they have already been asked, you can point me to the right direction and it will be greatly appreciated.

1) Most of the movies I watch are on my 15" widescreen laptop. Just like today i played a dvd i put it full screen in windows media player but the movie doesnt stretch out completely. Meaning there are small horizontal strips from top and bottom of the screen which dont get filled and are black. I thought mayb my windows media player is corrupted, so i downloaded another media player and tried again, again same results. I watched other movies and clips before as well and they give same results. What's up with that ? Arn't dvds supposed to be like full screen ? so i am guessing somethings wrong with the aspect ratio of these movies. If i am wrong can someone tell me how to watch a DVD movie which covers the whole screen ? Thx in advance

2) what is the best free burning program which can burn data, movies, music and so on, and what is the best paid program which can burn data, movies, music and so on. I am looking for an alternative to nero

Thx in advance

[redwudz]

There's really nothing much wrong with Nero. It does great as a burning program. It's problems are with all the rest it 'tries' to do, like encode and author. JMO.

But for DVD burning, especially freeware, ImgBurn is good. It will do ISO's and VIDEO_TS folders.
If you want to do other formats, like data or music, look to our 'Tools' page under 'Burn' for other freeware and payware burning programs.

Software video players handle video files in different ways. WMP is maybe not a good choice for DVD viewing. I would try a program like PowerDVD or similar that is made for DVD playing. Alternately, try VLC Media Player. It has a DVD mode and you can easily select aspect ratios. As a bonus, it plays just about any video format with it's own codecs, so no codec installs needed. Even if you don't use it for DVD, it's handy to have around. It's also freeware.

And welcome to our forums.

[manono]

Also, your laptop screen, if it's like mine, isn't 16:9, but 16:10. Therefore, every movie you'll ever watch on it will have black bars added somewhere, either on the left and right sides when watching "fullscreen" movies, or on the top and bottom when watching "widescreen" movies. So what? You could always fill the screen one way or another, either cropping and cutting off parts of the video, or by stretching, thus giving it bad aspect ratio. Both are lousy ideas.

[TooLFooL]

there are many different aspect ratios... a 16:9 movie will fill the screen completely, while a 2.40:1 or 1.85:1 will not.