Embodiments of a method and system described herein enable capture of video data streams from multiple, different devices and the processing of the video data streams. The video data streams are merged such that various data protocols can all be processed with the same worker processors on different types of operating systems, which are typically distributed. An embodiment uses a mobile device (such as a mobile phone) as a device and deploys a video sensor application on the mobile device for encoding consecutive video files, time stamping the consecutive video files, and pushing the consecutive video files to a file server to produce a stable stream of video data. Thus avoiding the inefficiencies associated with having video processing in the data flow loop.