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Remember what it was like to capture video off a computer screen before desktop recording software came along?

You'd mount a big, expensive camera on a tripod, point it at the screen and, unless you had tweaked a bunch of settings or loaded special software, you'd get black bars creeping up and down the screen because of a refresh rate mismatch. And once you solved that problem, you still needed to be well versed in editing tools, video-tape transfer and replication.

Jing has consistently been one of our favorite screenshot and screencasting tools here at ReadWriteWeb (especially among the Windows users). With one simple tool, you can take screenshots or record videos and save them to your computer or upload them to online services like flickr, YouTube, and TechSmith's own Screencast.com.

Today, with the launch of Jing 2.1, both Jing and Jing Pro users are getting a bevy of new features which makes the little app we can't live without just that much better.

Jing, one of our favorite free screenshot and screencasting tools, just received a major update. Besides adding a new look and feel, TechSmith, Jing's parent company, also announced a new Pro version of Jing, which, for $14.95 a year, allows users to record their screencasts in HD H.264 video, directly upload them to YouTube, and remove the Jing logos that appear at the beginning and end of videos produced with the free version of Jing.