This tv show was made at a time when tv sets were 4:3 aspect ratio.
It appears that the station is broadcasting it with black borders added to the sides of the original picture, so the video is now 16:9
And that is what Plex is recording. It doesn’t alter the video stream in any way. It doesn’t know that what it is recording is actually a 4:3 video with black borders added to the sides.
If you now play this “16:9 video” on a screen that is taller than 16:9, you will see black borders on all sides. The black border left and right are contained in the recorded video, and the black borders at the top&bottom are added by the plex client, because it wants to show you the full area of what (it thinks) is a 16:9 video.
white = the original 4:3 picture
light grey = borders added by the tv station to fill a 16:9 screen
dark grey = areas of your screen for which there are no pixels in the video file
The only 2 ways to that I know to watch such a file in Plex are:
- use a tv which has a ‘Zoom’ feature
- take the recorded file and put it through Handbrake to crop out the black borders, thus transcoding it again
