XviD not only competes with DivX, but in almost every test I've seen it's beaten DivX. I've found that I prefer it over DivX and 3ivX when encoding video. (I've been using the newest version (1.0.1) available at www.koepi.org, and not the older version here at afterdawn, but the two are quite comparable) (Users should be aware that not all the beta versions, such as the version available here, are guaranteed to be supported by the final version, but as of yet, I haven't run across anything encoded in older versions of XviD that the new codec won't play.

Shareaza has been working quite well for me (although I've been using version 2.0.0.0, which is available at www.shareaza.com, not the older version posted here) The interface is similar to eMule, but simplified, and as such, it doesn't give you quite as wide a range of options to work with. The only thing that bothers me about it is that it serems to measure download speed in Kilobits per second instead of Kilobytes as most other p2p software does, but that only took a while to get used to.