[selowitch]

In all but full-screen mode, Apple's DVD Player places totally black bars atop and below widescreen movies. However, in full-screen mode, the bars are inexplicably gray, creating a unpleasant banding effect of black-gray-the movie-more gray-then black again. I hate it and would love to figure out a way to make the gray bands black.

Wouldn't you?

[OwlBoy]

Its grey cuz your monitor is too bright.

-Owl

[selowitch]

Originally Posted by OwlBoy

Its grey cuz your monitor is too bright.

-Owl

Brilliant. I could turn down the brightness all the way and my whole screen would be black. But that wouldn't be terribly useful.

[Lew]

Chances are that the black bars you see when not in full-screen mode are part of the picture (if viewing films with a wider aspect ratio than 16:9 then it'll be stored as a letterboxed 16:9 image). When you view in full-screen mode your Mac has to add extra bars on top of the existing bars. I agree though that they should be black.

[selowitch]

Originally Posted by Lew

I agree though that they should be black.

Indeed. I wonder if they fix this under Panther?

[mugget]

WTF??

in Panther i didn't notice anything like this... what sort of screen are you using? do you have the brightness setup too much? that might give you washed out colors...

[selowitch]

As Lew pointed out, there is a subtle but noticeable difference in the color of the top and bottom bars in full screen. They're gray rather than black, and it's annoying. VLC doesn't have this problem, but unfortunately it doesn't play back DVDs as smoothly as Apple's DVD player.