I have installed the UV4L suite of software onto RPi3 with Jessie. I am using a USB cam (Logitech C170) rather than RPi cam. Configuration of UV4L seems to require an in-depth understanding of Linux and video, which I unfortunately dont have.

On bootup the streaming server at http://IP Addr:8080 displays fine but none of the camera streams on that site show an image. If I run "dd if=/dev/video0 of=snapshot.jpeg bs=11M count=1" I get "failed to open ‘/dev/video0’: Operation not permitted". If I change the device to video1 or video2 it runs successfully, but the resulting jpegs seem corrupt, as they will not display in a browser.

I killed all of the u4vl processes (sudo was required), as I expect things were starting with the wrong defaults. After doing that I cant restart the server: no matter how I try to start Uv4l I get "[core] No device detected".

Update

Its not entirely clear from the online instructions, but USB webcams trigger a streaming server at port 8090 NOT at port 8080. (Strangely it still runs a server at 8080 even though I dont have a pi camera). The problem I have now is the streaming service at 8090 only works once I run "sudo service uv4l_raspicam restart" after any reboot. It is also confusing that when I run "uv4l -t –list-drivers" it returns an empty list and "uv4l –driver-help" returns "[core] No device detected"...even when my USB camera is successfully streaming.

Why is it requiring a restart and how can I get this to work from the outset when the Pi is rebooted?