I got a new monitor. It is a ASUS VH242H 23.6 HDMI LCD monitor. It is great. The only thing is that when I watch a DVD it puts a black 2 inch border around the whole screen so it isn't truly full screen. Can someone please tell me why this is? I'm thinking because I have onboard graphics only and no HD video card? I am running XP. Typically play back DVD's in Windows Media Player, but sometimes use DIVX. Thanks in advance.

Mike

Nope - that should not matter, assuming the on-board graphics is capable of wide screen resolutions. Understand the term "full screen" for DVD movies is NOT widescreen, but the old 4:3 ratio resolutions used for normal (non-WS) TV signals. Your DVDs must be in widescreen format, otherwise, your graphics will place the black bands around the image.

Since we know nothing about your computer, motherboard, or on-board graphics, I can offer no more advice except to check your settings.

My motherboard's on-board graphics display at 1920 X 1080. I noticed that when I played a DVD in a lower resolution then switched the resolution back to 1080p while the video was open it went full screen. And yes, I am using a widescreen format DVD.

Here are my specs:

ASUS A8V-VM SE 939 VIA K8M890 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131069)
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ Venice 2.2GHz Socket 939 Single-Core Processor ADA3400DAA4BY - CORSAIR 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
WINDOWS XP Home Edition

This post has been edited by m5fromns: Jul 2 2009, 07:13 AM

I note here there are driver updates since the product was released.

But I think the problem is simply most DVD movies don't use that resolution and to keep the aspect ratios correct, and to avoid stretching the image, the black bands ("masking") are added because a bright white border around the movies would not go over too well.