Black bars while playing videos is a common issue. They appear on the left and right sides or on the top and bottom of the video. It can be quite distracting and annoying to watch videos with these black lines.
The black lines mainly appear due to the difference in aspect ratios. The most common aspect ratios are 4:3, standard for TV’s and 16:9, for high-definition videos. When you try to play a 4:3 movie on a 16:9 player or vice-versa, there may be differences and lead to black bars.
Other common reasons are third-party plugins. These plugins automatically resize the video and thus changes the aspect ratio, creating issues.
In this article, we explain how to resolve this problem. But first, it is a good idea to check if the black bars are a part of the video or they are only an empty section on the screen. You can do this by opening the video using VLC player.
- Go to Preferences in the VLC player and select Video
- On the right, look for Video Cropping and enter either ‘16:10’, ‘4:3’ or 16:9’. This depends on the aspect ratio of your screen.
- To save the changes, press Save at the bottom.
Now restart VLC player and check if the black lines are visible. If it’s not, they were only an empty section of the video and are gone now. However, if they are still present, they are a part of the video and to fix this, you will have to manually adjust the aspect ratio.
In the top menu bar, select Video and click on Aspect ratio. This will list down all the aspect ratios present. You have various options such as Default, 16:9, 4:3, 1:1, 16:10, 21:1, 35:1, 39:1, 5:4. You can play around with these options to see which one removes the black bars. Ideally one of them should help fix black lines for you.
However, if none of these options solve the problem, you can set a customized aspect ratio. To do so,
- In the menu bar, go to Tools > Preferences
- Under Preferences, select Video
- In the field ‘Force Aspect Ratio’, enter a value
- To save the changes, click Save and restart the VLC player.
Now VLC player uses the new aspect ratio to play videos. This will solve your problem of black lines in the videos.
Now that we have seen how to remove black bars, let us discuss some other problems with video files. The files may be blurry or pixelated. In some cases, the audio-video is out of sync or only the audio plays or only the video plays. These are indicative of corruption. In such cases, you will have to repair the file for it to play normally.
Remo Repair MOV is a great tool to repair corruption issues with MP4 and MOV files. You can repair all kinds of corruption issues from simple header issues to virus infected files. Refer how to fix corrupted video files MP4 for more details on the steps involved.