Recently, I ran into a very puzzling problem.

One fine day, my videos suddenly had a black border around it. I remembered clearly that previously they played fine in full-screen (Alt-Enter), but now in full-screen, they have this black border around it.

I tried playing the same video in VLC, and it played fine in full screen. So that implies that the video only is affected by DirectShow filters.

I then tried to recall what I did recently just prior to this problem, and I remembered that I turned on the ATI Catalyst “Steady Video” function.

 

It was set to “95%” when I first saw it. So, I moved the slider to 100%, but yet the black border persisted.

In desperation, I un-checked the “Enable AMD Steady Video” option, and my videos went back to full-screen!

So, if the normal fixes of making WMP stretch the video to fill your screen doesn’t get rid of black borders, and if you’re using an ATI graphics card, try looking at this option and see if it will fix your problem.

 

 

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