CyberLink YouCam
Description
I have a very specific memory of discovering CyberLink YouCam. It was March 2020, the first week of lockdown, and I was about to join a work meeting on Zoom from my bedroom. The lighting was terrible, the background was a pile of unfolded laundry, and I looked like I had not slept in three days — which, to be fair, I had not. In a panic, I began to scroll through my programs searching for anything that might help, and there it was sitting in the Start menu of my HP laptop, something called CyberLink YouCam that I had never opened in two years of owning the machine. I assumed it was bloatware. Fifteen minutes later I was sitting on the Zoom call with smooth skin, adjusted lighting, and a virtual background covering the laundry pile. My manager said I looked surprisingly well-rested. I did not correct her.
The software is made by CyberLink, the Taiwanese company behind PowerDirector and a bunch of other multimedia tools. YouCam is a virtual camera — you install it, and it shows up as a webcam source in whatever video app you are using. Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Skype, OBS Studio they all pick it up. The app takes your real webcam feed, applies whatever effects or corrections you have chosen, and sends the amended video to the other app. Everything occurs in real-time, so the other person sees the improved version of you without needing any special software on their end.
The feature set is larger than what I expected from something that came pre-installed next to 15 other programs that I immediately deleted. There are over 200 AR effects — animated face filters, particle overlays, frames, distortion effects, scenes that drop your face into absurd virtual environments. The face beautification tools include skin smoothing, auto-lighting correction and a layer of makeup that is subtle enough not to look ridiculous on a man in a business meeting, which I can attest to from personal experience. Background replacement and blur are included as well as an overlay system for adding logos, titles or images into your feed, this is targeted at streamers and content creators. YouCam also takes care of screen recording, webcam capture and has a simple photo editor built in.
During the peak pandemic era, I was using this thing almost every day and it got its place on my taskbar. The auto-lighting feature on its own was worth it — my home office faces north, and on overcast days the webcam made me look like a ghost. CyberLink’s TrueTheater processing made intelligent adjustments to the brightness and contrast so that colleagues stopped asking if I was feeling okay. The smoothing of the skin came in a close second. I am not vain when it comes to video calls, but the difference between the raw webcam feed and the processed was like having a decent ring light without having purchased one. A friend on the team eventually asked what my camera setup was, and I felt a bit guilty admitting that it was just software doing all the work.
That said, the background replacement was always one step behind Zoom’s built-in version. The edge detection around hair and shoulders was quite rougher, especially in low light. I would get a flickering halo effect around my head that made it look like I was being poorly green-screened into a stock photo of an office. Zoom figured out edge detection a lot better by mid-2021 and once that happened, I stopped using YouCam’s background tool and switched to Zoom’s native one with the rest of the CyberLink effects still on. You can stack them — use YouCam for face enhancement and let Zoom take care of the background — that’s a workaround I stumbled onto by accident.
Performance is very much dependent on your hardware and this is where YouCam either works great or falls apart completely. On my main desktop with i7 and 16GB of RAM, everything ran fine with multiple effects running. On my wife’s old HP running a Celeron and 4GB of RAM the app transformed her webcam feed into what I can only describe as a PowerPoint presentation running at two frames per second with a beauty filter smeared on top. The audio was out of sync, the image pixelated whenever she moved, and the whole thing was like it was strangling the CPU. I uninstalled it from her machine the same day I installed it.
There is one bug which I have dealt with at least a dozen times where YouCam loses its connection to the webcam when minimized to the system tray. You close the main window, it sits in the tray quietly and then when you try to bring it back up before a call it throws an error saying it can’t find the camera. There is no other app using the webcam. The camera works fine in Zoom directly. But YouCam just refuses to reconnect until you kill the process and relaunch, and sometimes even that doesn’t work and you end up rebooting the whole machine. Softpedia pointed out this same problem in their review many years ago. The fact that it still happens tells me CyberLink either cannot reproduce it consistently or does not consider it a priority. Either way, it has resulted in my being late at least three meetings.
The app also adds itself to Windows startup without asking, which is a pet peeve of mine with any software. Every boot up, YouCam silently loads itself into the system tray, consuming a small slice of RAM and CPU doing absolutely nothing until you open it up. You can disable this in the settings or through Task Manager, but the default behavior is to assume you want this running all the time. On a fast machine, irrelevant. On a slower one, it is one more thing to contribute to a sluggish boot.
Pricing is straight forward but the free version is thin. The Essential edition — which is what you get for free after the 30-day trial expires — offers you basic viewing and a tiny selection of effects. The Standard edition is approximately $35 one-time. The Deluxe goes for about $45 and opens everything — TrueTheater, full AR library, background tools, screen recording. There is also a subscription option for YouCam 365. The trial does not require a credit card, which I appreciate. But the gap between the free and paid versions is quite high that the free one feels more like a demo than a usable product.
The biggest problem CyberLink YouCam faces in 2026 is not a bug or a pricing issue – it is relevance. When I first began using it in 2020, Zoom had no built-in filters, Teams had no background blur, and Google Meet had nothing other than a basic video feed. Now all three platforms have their own skin touch up tools, background effects, noise suppression and lighting adjustments baked right in. They are not as feature-rich as what YouCam offers, but they are free, require no extra software, and work on Mac and mobile — two platforms where CyberLink’s app does not exist at all. For the average person who simply wants to look a little better while on a work call, the built-in tools have caught up enough to make a separate webcam app seem like overkill.
If you are a streamer using OBS or XSplit and want your face filters, branded overlays and AR effects to be piped into your stream in real-time, CyberLink YouCam still provides real value that is not available in platform-native tools. If you are a remote worker who landed here because you googled “how to look better on Zoom,” you probably do not need it anymore — the answer is already inside Zoom’s settings menu. And if YouCam came up on your new HP laptop and you are wondering what it is, it is a decent webcam tool from a legitimate company that was extremely useful three years ago and has been slowly losing its reason to exist ever since.
