Stretch Video in Windowed Mode

[DeathJester]

Hello. I am new to VLC, I switched because I was sick of trying to figure out what codecs I had/didn't have, which once were working, how to configure them blah blah blah, I just wanted to watch videos for crying out loud!

Aaaanyway, I have a question about VLC that I hope I can get an answer to:

I like to play my videos in windowed mode, but full-screen (does that make sense?). The problem is I always get black bars on the left and right of the video when in windowed mode. In proper fullscreen mode, those bars go away, so I think it has something to do with the border/interface. Is there a way to get a video to stretch to full screen when in windowed mode?

Hope someone can help

-DeathJester

[VLC_help]

You can toggle autoscaling on/off with hotkey o.

[DeathJester]

I know it's been a long time, but I've started trying to use VLC again.
Hitting 'o' does indeed turn off autoscaling, but the videos I am watching are kind of small (mostly pulled off YouTube) so they end up as a small picture in the middle of the screen.

Like I said on my first post, I think the interface is the problem - if I go into Minimal View Mode, a lot of the black bars go away. So I need to figure out a way to force the video to either ignore the interface and go behind it, or to stop forcing the aspect ratio and go full-width even if it means the picture is slightly stretched.