I've noticed that a couple of the SD movies I have play weird on my XA2. I have a 16:9 tv.

I watched 2010 and Broken Arrow, and both movies played with thick black borders on all four sides. Why is that, and what can I do about it?

Probably because those discs are not 16x9 enhanced.

Yes indeed, this happens when playing back DVDs that are not 16:9/anamorphically enhanced.

I'm afraid there's no setting in the player to remedy this, you are at the mercy of your telly's zoom options.

My solution to this was sell my non-anamorphic DVDs. And buy HD versions if available.

I think those are disks that were designed to be shown on regular
NTSC TVs in widescreen. The side black bars wouldn't show on those TVs. They were probably mastered before 16:9 TVs became common.

I posted about non-anamorphic DVDs in this thread about The Princess Bride (http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=912893).

If the DVD is not anamorphic, that means the top and bottom bars are encoded in the movie making the content 4:3. HD-DVD players recognize the 4:3 content and add pillar bars to make it 16:9.

Anything that's letterboxed looks like this...

On my 360, I simply lower the resolution if I'm watching something that's fool-screen or letterboxed, typicially only Bonus/Extra Material or TV shows in which case the fool-screen is OAR.