dvds cannot play fully in pan and scan

[i3omberman28]

I have a Pioneer DV344 dvd player.
I have borrowed a few dvds and I cannot seem to get rid of the two black bars, i.e it looks like a movie in letterbox mode.

I have tried to run it in pan and scan to get rid of the black bars, but to no avail. Please tell me how to get rid of the black bars. I have tried pan and scan mode and all the other modes, but no help.

Any ideas?

Ibtw, i do not have a widescreen tv.

[Craig Tucker]

If you play a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV set, you will get black bars. I suppose you could zoom in on the picture if your DVD player supports this function, but you will lose a lot of the picture. The other options are different TV display modes, for example my TV has an automatic mode that fits the picture to the screen and removes the black bars that you get on 2.85:1 movies, but my TV is a widesreen TV and has about 7 different display modes. I don't know of any 4:3 tv's that have different display modes. Basically you are stuck with black bars, and even if you could get it to fit to the screen I don't think you would like the results. You would either have a very vertically stretched picture or you would have a lot of the picture cropped off at the edges. The best way to view a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV is with black bars at the top and bottom, this way the aspect ratio is correct and none of the picture is cropped from the edges.