I've owned the same Sony 27" SDTV for the past twenty years of my life. It's a great tv that still works fine today. I didn't want to part with it, but with the recent trends in video games it's almost a must. I have 20/20 vision and I have to squint, strain, and stare for a minute or two deciphering every sentence that comes on screen. It was pretty much impossible to get through certain games, like The Witcher 2 for example.

Anyway, I got a Vizio at Costco the other day just in time for Bioshock Infinite. Everything works fine, I changed the switch on the back of the A/V to HD and I changed the settings to 1080p. Games work fine, full widescreen and what I assume is HD, I mean hey I can finally read the text in game! But then last night I got a DVD from Netflix. After putting it in my Xbox 360 I noticed that there's still black bars on the top and bottom of the movie, the screen is very grainy, and it doesn't fill out the whole screen., so black bars on the left and right as well.

Can anyone help? I assume a hdmi cable is in order but there isn't a slot for in on my X360.

I thought most 360s had an HDMI cable port? Do you have an older one? Seems the older models were the ones that lacked that port.

Some movies will have the black bars. Some movies were just made to be in a certain format that HDTVs cannot do or cannot do well enough. The DVD for the first Land Before Time movie has this problem and turns out, the version in theaters just wasn't meant to be on HDTVs. Sadly, MGM probably will never bother trying to make an HD friendly version of that movie.

Check to see when the movie you rented came out. This may answer plenty of questions about that. Also, no amount of settings will make some PS2 era games look any better or any less stretched. I tried to make Okami look good on my 1080p TV and nothing worked.

Thank for the answer. It's a pretty old Xbox, I got it specifilly for Oblivion when that came out. I didn't know others had a port for it

And I was watching Kill Bill vol. 2 if that helps. I feel like that's a fairly new movie, I dunno.

All Xbox 360s since 2007 have HDMI.

Kill Bill 2 will have black bars up and down as it's aspect ratio is 2.35:1. There shouldn't be any black bars on the sides though, that's probably something with netflix or the settings or something.

Generally speaking, there are 3 movie aspect ratios.

• 4:3 which is the thing for old pre-widescreen TVs, and will give black bars on the sides on a widescreen TV.
• 16:9 which is widescreen and fit the widescreen TVs "perfectly".
• 2.35:1 which is even more widescreen and will give black bars up and down on a widescreen TV. There are very few 2.35:1 TVs available.

Most TVs are also able to stretch the image to fill the whole screen so there are never any black bars, but I don't really like that.