newbie playing dvd question/internet

Hello
I havent had my macbook for very long & still tinkering with it, Love it though!
When playing a dvd (The Thing - John Carpenters) The picture is widescreen but in the middle of the screen with big borders etc. Is this normal? Or can you get dvd's to play filling the whole screen?
Also when using the safari browser is there any way you can fill the whole screen rather than having to stretch the window? Sorry if these are lame questions but I have only had a few days & am used to using windows.
Thanks in advance.

most DVDs will play with large black borders...are you using DVD player or Front Row?
go to this website: http://www.jydesign.com/safari/ and drag the "Full Screen" bookmark into your bookmarks bar, so whenever u click it the window will become fullscreen.

Whether a DVD fills the whole screen or not will depend on the aspect ratio of the movie. There are several widescreen aspects that are used in filming and not all of them will fill a 16:9 (TV's) or 16:10 (your Macbook) screen. Bars on the top and bottom will be normal and you should have the same on your TV unless you use the built-in stretch function of your DVD player of TV.

edit: if you are talking about it being in a window rather than full desktop - just double click inside the window to take it to fullscreen mode - then to go back to a window, once again, just double click in it.

I also do not like Safari for the main reason you have noted. No you cannot have it fill the whole screen without having to go down and drag it to the size you want. This is Apple's idea of having the application only as big as it needs to be to. Personally I want a maximize button that maximizes (know I am going to get flamed here.
But, you can use Firefox - many do, or you can try Opera - my personal favorite (in OS X and in XP) and both will do what you want.

edit: nice link there narf, only when i try to drag it to the bookmarks bar, safari tells me it does not allow java script to be used in this way

hmm...thats odd...for me it works fine...did u download the new java release?