Vista - Why are there vertical black bars in preview of Movie Maker?

I have a widescreen camera which was used in widescreen format. After I've
imported the film, the clips play back in the preview window with black bars
on the sides with the content "tall and skinny". I've selected NTSC and 16:9
for options in Movie Maker.

It seems M.M. doesn't recognize this as a widescreen movie. Is this
something I have to live with in the preview window until it comes time to
burn the DVD, in which case the aspect ratio issue will be rectified?

For others out there who may be experiencing the same problem: I installed
the famous Haali's splitter, which is very good at opening MKV, TS files and
others including AVI files. Apparently, Haali's AVI splitter doesn't pass
the 16:9 flag very well to the internal WMM machinery. I just uninstalled
Haali's splitter, and the preview window at 16:9 no longer showed the
vertical black bars.

"floepie" wrote: