AVI screen problem

[mikehende]

Hello, I am using a WINTV-GO capture card to capture what's showing on my Satellite TV unto my pc and record it. I noticed that no matter which program I use to play back the recorded AVI file, the pic I get comes with a lot of empty "black" space around it. It's almost like watching a movie in the Cinema where you have the black partitions on top and at the bottom of the pic, the only difference here is that there are black partitions on both "left and right" of the pic also so it's like the pic you see is in a rectangular black box which makes the pic very small.
Is this normal? Is there anything I can do not to see the black partitions[borders]?

[Arachnotron]

Is this normal? Is there anything I can do not to see the black partitions[borders]Yes, that is normal. Your card captures more of the signal than just the active part containing video. That stuff is called horizontal blanking and vertical blanking and shows up as black bars at the side of a capture. On TV you normally won't notice this because it is hidden in the overscan area of the TV. In the capture guide (see links at the top of this forum) you can find further info about what goes into an analog video signal and what it looks like once captured.