Black bars on videos

[Rather Unique1]

I mainly watch movies and TV shows on Amazon Video. I am noticing a lot of these new HD movies have even bigger black bars and when you add them they make up at least 50% of the entire screen meaning I am left with a small video on my tablet s3 9.7 inches. I even tried to view it on my browsers on my tablet but none of them can play video so I have to use Amazon Video. Even on Netflix I see the same annoying, unnecessary, pointless bars people refer to as aspect ratio. I contacted both Amazon Video and Samsung and they tell me there is nothing that can be done so does anyone know if there is a 3rd party app that can fix this problem??? It's the stupidest way to watch videos. It doesn't make sense. It's like I have these tablets for nothing since I can even watch the videos in at least normal size. On my laptop not only are the bars not on the top and bottom (they are smaller bars on the left and right corners and not enough to bother me) but on my laptop I can also make it full size using the option on the Amazon video. There is NO full size option on the app. There used to be years ago but Amazon got rid of it. This would easily be fixed if they bought it back. I tried watching Black Panther and Spider-Man homecoming and these newer HD movies like I said before are using even bigger black bars on the bottom and top so I am sure that the video I am seeing is only taking about 40 to 45% of the entire screen... It's the stupidest thing I ever seen when it comes to displaying of video on screen. What can I do to fix the problem???

 

[Rukbat]

I see the same annoying, unnecessary, pointless bars people refer to as aspect ratio.

Stop listening to those people. The aspect ratio is the ratio of the longer side of the screen to the shorter side.

The bars aren't "aspect ratio", they're there because of the aspect ratio of the tablet. They're not going to make 5 or 6 movie versions for devices of different aspect ratios (the tablet is 4:3, some phones are 16:9, others are 18:9, etc.), so there are two choices - either the short side is set to fill the whole screen and you're missing the ends of the long aide or the long side is set to fill the whole screen and there are bars filling in the missing parts along those sides. You can't put a 16:9 format video (pretty much the standard for movies) on a 4:3 screen and have it fill the screen - you'd have to stretch the "3" side and that would distort everything - people with long, drawn-out faces, cars that looked too short, etc.

I tried watching Black Panther and Spider-Man homecoming and these newer HD movies like I said before are using even bigger black bars on the bottom and top

They may have been shot in 18:9 to accommodate the newer phone screens. That would make it worse for a 4:3 screen.

(Play with the video settings on your TV set - most of them can give you compressed vertical, compressed horizontal, etc. That's just changing the aspect ratio of the picture they're displaying. And some of them can get pretty weird-looking.)

 

[Rather Unique1]

so how do I fix the problem on my tablet? Other movies and TV shows play in full screen or close to full screen.

 

[M Stuart]

so how do I fix the problem on my tablet? Other movies and TV shows play in full screen or close to full screen.

You don't, it's not a "problem" as such. The further the content's aspect ratio diverge from your tablet's fixed aspect ratio (4:3), the bigger black bars you get, and there's a huge variety of ratios out there so no physical screen is ever going to be optimal to accommodate all of these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)

That said, best you can do is to choose a tablet with the aspect ratio closest to your use cases. In other words, if you're going to use your tablet mostly to watch video on it, the 16:10 ratio of, say, the Tab S4 is a much better fit than the S3's 4:3. On the other hand, for somebody like me who uses a tablet to read a lot of technical PDFs, the 4:3 ratio of the S3 is much better.

A poor consolation if you've already bought the tablet and can't return it, of course.