Ripplin i would say that you are correct when you say you will be getting a lot of people yelling at you when they finish the download and start to watch that. I would say that is unwatchable. Asteroid-man, what did you use to encode the XVID? You can easily fit a 2 hour movie to a 700mb xvid cd keeping good quality so it has nothing to do with the length of the film. Are the black bars encoded in the XVID too? And isn't the video vertically stretched? There are many guides to XVID encoding that would have helped. One thing i don't get though is with the video looking like that it would have to have a super low bitrate so it should have only been about 150mb Max with that quality. Its almost as if it was deliberately encoded that way. There is no detail in the picture whatsoever which, even at super low bitrate you would still get detail and not what looks to be a filter applied to destroy the video itself

I'm also curious as to why you will be taking donations. You say its because you will be sending copies out on DVD with printed covers, well this is dangerous territory. I have never charged anyone, or took donations, in return for a copy of the finished DVD's. Just because someone has offered does not mean that you should accept monetary payment for your edit. I had many offers of donations, but the ones that offered when there was no equipment or materials for my edit, these were turned down or returned to them if they had already sent the donation. I have always felt that receiving any monetary compensation so you can send out copies is too close to actually selling the edit, which goes against everything reputable fan editors stand for. It can also get you noticed by the wrong people.