I don't see a black band. What I see is the video player starts loading at a certain size which is about an inch short of the height available (with white space below it). Then the video finishes loading and starts playing, and then suddenly the video resizes to fill the entire vertical height.

Thank you for replying jscher2000...do you have any advice on how to fix this? Hesitant to redo video because all is working well in Chrome and Safari...Would appreciate any input you would be willing to share. Thanks so much!

I don't know what template/framework/script you use to size the video to the browser viewport, but perhaps there is a trick to make it resize much sooner. You could check with the provider.