Videolan.org has a section in their forums for "VLC media player Feature Requests". I have been using VLC for many years and, other than being a tad light on documentation, I find it pretty damn awesome. But there is one small thing that always bothered me. If you are watching a video in a window and you manually resize that window (other than by using the alt-# hotkeys to toggle between preset zoom factors) you will likely end up with a window that has black borders on either the top/bottom, or sides.
These borders serve no purpose other than to waste precious desktop space so after resizing I carefully adjust one edge to remove the offending borders. This is easily done, but a waste of my (albeit minimal) time and effort. So I put in a feature request that on a resize (in non-full screen), VLC should automatically strip the black borders.
Let me be absolutely clear. I am not asking VLC to remove black borders that are encoded as part of some videos.
Such a simple request resulted in multiple misunderstandings as to what I was asking, multiple complaints that what I wanted would affect the aspect ratio (in spite of my mentioning several times that aspect ratio should ALWAYS be preserved), and some discussion of something called the "principles of least surprise" which the responder says demands that the app act the same in full screen or windowed mode. In other words, if the video, in full screen mode, has a black border then it should also have one in windowed mode.
While I am not (yet) at the point where I am questioning my sanity, I would like some non-involved feedback as to whether there is any valid reason why you might want black borders on the top/bottom, or sides of a windowed video.
Incidentally, my previous media player was BSPlayer (free) which DID support a variable zoom in/out via the scroll wheel, and DID remove unused space at the edges.