uTIPu has released an updated version of TipCam, the company's free screencast recording application for Windows. TipCam 2.0 has the same basic look and feel as the older version, but sports a few new features, including:

• Upload videos to YouTube directly from the application (previously you could only upload videos to uTIPu)
• Export files in AVI format (previously you could only save Flash video files)
• 800 x 600 pixel and 480 x 360 pixel resolutions now supported in addition to 640 x 480 pixel resolution
• Option to display a countdown before the recording starts
• Option to cancel an upload in progress

TipCam still limits recordings to 20 minutes. But at $0, the price is right, so we're not going to complain too much about the time limit. If you're looking for other free screencast recorders for Windows, you might want to check out Debut or Jing.

Last week we took a look at uTIPu, a free screencast recording application for Windows, and we were pretty impressed. For a free utility, uTIPu has a nice feature set and produces decent quality recordings. Users can also upload them to a web site and share via an embed code. But there were a few rough edges to smooth out last week. Today, uTIPu has started the smoothing process with the release of uTIPu 1.5.

The update brings a brand new user interface and a couple of new features including:

• Record videos up to 20 minutes long (the previous limit was 5 minutes)
• Option to add a voice-over track after you're done recording the video instead of in real-time
• You can now set uTIPu to change your screen resolution before a recording starts instead of just squeezing a 1280 x 1024 display down 640 x 480 in real-time
• There's a new mini-toolbar you can use to access the controls during a recording session without taking up as much space on your display as the full application. If you don't want the application or the toolbar to show up in your recording at all, you can minimize the application to the system tray once you've started a recording.
  

There's also a new "public computer" mode that prevents uTIPu from saving your login information. And the embed code has been updated so that it should be easier to embed videos on any web site. When we tried embedding a video last week, we had trouble resizing to fit properly on Download Squad until Oleg from uTIPu recommended a way to modify the code manually. Now users shouldn't have to do any manual tweaking.

FreeScreenCast isn't the only game in town when it comes to easy to use free software for recording action on your Windows desktop. Like FreeScreenCast, uTipu is a free Windows app that lets you record videos and upload them to a web server. You can either send links to your videos to friends or use the embed code to post the videos on your own web site.

The screencast recorder is fairly basic. There are no advanced editing features, so if you're not happy with your voice track, or if you want to redo the beginning or end of a video you're going to have to redo the whole thing. But you can hit pause while you're making a recording to collect your thoughts before continuing.

Unlike FreeScreenCast, uTipu allows users to save files to their desktop as Flash videos. So if you have a video editor that can handle Flash videos, you can make edits using a third party application. You also have much more control over your settings with uTipu than FreeScreenCast. You can adjust your bit rate and choose your zoom level, which will let you do things like capture your fullscreen desktop while compressing the video to 640 x 480 pixels. You can also zoom in on just the area of the screen you want to focus on.

You can find a sample video we uploaded after the jump. Yes, we know it's too large to properly fit on our website, but if you alter the embed code trying to shrink the video you just wind up awkwardly cropping the video

Update: Oleg from uTIPu contacted us to show us how to shrink a video by adding "overstretch=fit"to the embed code. He also tells us there will be an updated version of the client with some additional features coming out soon.

[via WebWare]