i've got some widescreen .mp4 video files that i've been loading to my storm's memory card and playing....

i noticed that 2 recent videos i loaded are using the entire screen and the picture is distorted, as opposed to some previous videos i've watched that displayed in a letterbox format (black bars along the top/bottom)....

does this have to do with the resolution of the video file ? these are itunes tv shows, which i've decrypted with requiem in order to play back on my phone and other devices.

It has to do with the way that the videos were encoded. If the aspect ratio is 4:3, then it will fill up the whole screen with no adjustments. If the aspect ratio is 16:9 (widescreen), or even higher, then encode the video using the "Pan and Scan" zoom mode - if your software offers it. Yes, you'll lose some of the content off the sides of the screen, but the resulting video will fill up more of your screen.

i used vlc media player to play these tv shows, and looked up the media metadata...the shows that did display in letterbox (on the device) had a resolution of 640x360, avc1 (codec), mp4.

the shows that use the whole screen (on the device) (they are getting stretched vertically)...640x480, avc1....mp4.

i'm just not certain why it is stretching the picture vertically.

I take it that you didn't do the MP4 encoding yourself? It just doesn't sound to me like they were encoded properly.