We’re all watching more video on the internet than ever before, be it via YouTube, Netflix or any number of other video delivery/sharing sites. You’ll notice however that some monitors provide true widescreen (meaning the entire screen is filled on press of the "fullscreen" button) easily while others don’t. The reason for this is ratio. If the ratio of your monitor isn’t of a certain type, you will almost always see black bars for widescreen videos.

The current "Golden Ratio" for a whole bunch of internet video is 16:9

A monitor with a ratio of 16:9 will have the entire screen filled whether the video is 720p or 1080p.

A list of resolutions with a 16:9 ratio are:

• 854×480 (mobile devices)
• 960×540 (mobile devices)
• 1024×576 (netbooks)
• 1280×720
• 1600×900
• 1920×1080
• 2048×1152
• 2560×1440

Widescreen pixel resolutions that result in a display that is (mostly) not 16:9

• 1024×600 (netbooks, pixel aspect ratio of 16:9, storage aspect ratio of 128:75, small bars may be present on fullscreen)
• 1280×800 (8:5 ratio)
• 1366×768 (pixel aspect ratio of 16:9, storage aspect ratio of 683:384, small bars may be present on fullscreen)
• 1440×900 (8:5 ratio)
• 1680×1050 (8:5 ratio)
• 1920×1200 (8:5 ratio)
• 2560×1080 (21:9 ratio)
• 2560×1600 (8:5 ratio)

Workaround for 8:5 ratio to eliminate black bars?

Black bars can be eliminated by software means. The free VLC media player for example does does have ratio and crop adjustments you can set to "slightly" zoom in just enough to remove the bars – however bear in mind this won’t work for Silverlight or Flash-based video.

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