The letterbox is there to make it Blu-Ray compliant.

…Ah, that explains… thanks for quick reply.
Unfortunately I don’t have Blu-Rey burner.

VLC is perfectly capable of cropping the letterbox off if you don’t like it. If it won’t work with the standard crop settings, open tools and you can manually crop in there.

…Yes I found the manual crop but all it does is the same as standard settings: it crops part of the visible picture away but does not stretch it to fit the screen. It just removes pixels from visible picture.

Normally, without letterboxed video, choosing: video/crop/1,85:1 …the video crops and stretches to fit the whole display. This doesn’t happen with letterboxed for some reason (probably because the video here already fills the whole screen) I have check on “always fit window” setting, but changing it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

Sort of like my “quote” tags.