I think since I’ve upgraded to RC3, I’ve been having problems with black bars at top and bottom when I play 16:9 content.
This can be compensated for in Video > Playback, and that’s what I’ve been doing, but it causes problems when you play 2.39:1 (Theatrical) or 4.3 (SDTV) content.
I’ve set my resolution in System > Video output to 1920x1080i but that doesn’t seem to fix it.
For anyone else having this problem I recommend setting up Video Calibration with some 16:9 media playing, especially where you’re asked to make the box perfectly square.
16:9 is 1.77/1, the majority of movies are actually in 1.85/1 and many older movies are in 2.35/1. This means that on a correctly adjusted TV it’s normal to see thin black bars at the top and bottom of 1.85/1 movies and for 2.35/1 you will see quite large black bars at the top and bottom.
I don’t suppose you use overscan settings in config.txt ? If so check this post by popcornmix about recent firmware changes:
In all likelyhood you had enough overscan/zoom before to crop the sides off 1.85/1 and/or 2.35/1 material so that you didn’t see bars at the top and bottom.
The video that finally put me over the edge into fixing the problem was 4:3, I was using the setting to eliminate black bars and it worked great with 16:9.
The video I used when fixing was 720x404 ( 720 / 404 = 1.782178218 ). So I’d say it qualified as 16:9. Just to be safe I made sure the [fix black bars] option was turned off and adjusted the box’s shape while playing a 1920x1080 video.
When I adjusted the shape of the box in video calibration, it changed the shape of the video, eliminating the black bars when adjusted properly.