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Best Video Classification Models

Compare the best 4 video classification models and try them on your own image, free in the Roboflow Playground. 2 are open-weight, so you can self-host them for free under their licenses.

4 models · 2 open-weight · 4 free to try · prices synced Jul 29, 2026

Open-Source Video Classification Models

2 models with downloadable weights you can self-host under their licenses (Apache 2.0). All run live in the Playground through hosted APIs, so self-hosting is optional.

Qwen
Qwen3.6 27B
Qwen3.6-27B is a dense 27-billion-parameter multimodal language model developed by Alibaba's Qwen team and released on April 22, 2026. It combines a causal language model with an integrated vision encoder, supporting text, image, and video inputs natively. The architecture employs a hybrid attention design that interleaves Gated DeltaNet linear attention blocks with standard Gated Attention layers across 64 transformer layers with a hidden dimension of 5,120. Unlike Mixture-of-Experts variants in the Qwen3.6 family, all 27 billion parameters are active on every inference pass, simplifying deployment and quantization. The model supports a native context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible to approximately 1,010,000 tokens via YaRN scaling. It is released under the Apache 2.0 license with open weights available on Hugging Face and ModelScope.The model introduces two notable capabilities relative to prior Qwen releases: enhanced agentic coding support covering frontend workflows and repository-level reasoning, and a Thinking Preservation mechanism that retains chain-of-thought reasoning context across multi-turn conversation history to reduce redundant token generation in iterative agent sessions. It supports both a thinking mode for multi-step reasoning and a non-thinking mode for faster responses within a single model. On coding benchmarks, Qwen reports scores of 77.2 on SWE-bench Verified, 59.3 on Terminal-Bench 2.0, and 48.2 on SkillsBench. Vision capabilities include chart understanding (CharXiv RQ: 78.4), OCR (CC-OCR: 81.2), and video understanding (VideoMME with subtitles: 87.7).
Qwen
Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) multimodal language model developed by the Qwen team at Alibaba Group. It carries 35 billion total parameters but activates only approximately 3 billion per forward pass via a learned routing mechanism, giving it the representational capacity of a large dense model at a fraction of the inference compute. The model is natively multimodal, processing images, documents, and video alongside text as a core architectural capability rather than an add-on. It supports a native context window of 262,144 tokens, extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens via YaRN. A key design feature is the unified thinking/non-thinking mode framework: users can switch between deliberate chain-of-thought reasoning and fast direct responses within a single model, and a "thinking preservation" option retains reasoning context across multi-turn agentic workflows to reduce redundant computation.The model is specifically optimized for agentic coding tasks, including repository-level reasoning, frontend workflow generation, multi-step tool use, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration. On SWE-bench Verified it scores 73.4%, on Terminal-Bench 2.0 it scores 51.5%, and on MCPMark it scores 37.0%. For vision-language tasks it achieves 92.0 on RefCOCO, 89.9 on OmniDocBench 1.5, and 83.7 on VideoMMMU. The model also supports Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) for speculative decoding. All Qwen3.6 open-weight models are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Video Classification Models via API

2 proprietary models where the weights aren't downloadable: access is through each provider's API and billed by them. Try all of them free in the Playground.

Google
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite
NEW
Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite is a natively multimodal reasoning model developed by Google DeepMind, released on July 21, 2026 as part of the Gemini 3.5 model family. It is the fastest model in the 3.5 series, designed for both low-latency tasks and high-throughput production workloads such as agentic search, document processing, receipt translation, and large-scale data extraction. The model accepts text, images, audio, and video as inputs, with a context window of up to 1 million tokens, and produces text output. It supports configurable thinking levels, allowing developers to tune the balance between response quality, cost, and latency depending on workload requirements.On agentic and coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite significantly outperforms its predecessor, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, including on Terminal-Bench 2.1 (54% vs. 31%), GDM-MRCR v2 long-context (72.2% vs. 60.1%), and real-world task execution as measured by GDPval-AA v2 (1140 vs. 642). It also surpasses Gemini 3 Flash on SWE-Bench Pro (54.2% vs. 49.6%) and OSWorld-Verified (74.0% vs. 65.1%). According to the Artificial Analysis Index, the model generates output at approximately 350 tokens per second. It is built on the Gemini 3.5 Flash foundation and is evaluated across reasoning, coding, multimodal understanding, multilingual performance, and long-context tasks. The model is developed under Google's Frontier Safety Framework.
Google
Gemini 3.6 Flash
NEW
Gemini 3.6 Flash is a multimodal language model from Google DeepMind, positioned as the workhorse tier in the Gemini 3.x family. It accepts text, image, video, audio, and PDF inputs with a 1 million token context window and produces up to 64,000 output tokens. The model builds directly on Gemini 3.5 Flash, incorporating developer and customer feedback to improve token efficiency, coding quality, and knowledge work performance. According to the Artificial Analysis Index, it consumes 17% fewer output tokens than its predecessor, and on some benchmarks such as DeepSWE, token reduction reaches up to 65%. It supports function calling, structured output, search as a tool, and code execution, and includes computer use as a built-in capability in the Gemini API and Gemini Enterprise.On coding benchmarks, Gemini 3.6 Flash scores 49% on DeepSWE versus 37% for 3.5 Flash, and 63.9% on MLE Bench versus 49.7%. Computer use performance on OSWorld-Verified improves from 78.4% to 83%, and knowledge work scores on GDPval-AA v2 rise from 1349 to 1421. The model carries a knowledge cutoff of March 2026 and ships with enhanced Frontier Safety safeguards covering chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and cyber offense domains, with training to minimize refusals for beneficial uses. It is a proprietary, closed-weights model available in preview through the Gemini API via Google AI Studio, Android Studio, Google Antigravity, Gemini Enterprise, and the Gemini app.

How to Choose a Video Classification Model

Video classification labels clips rather than frames, and the deciding question is how much the label depends on motion: some actions exist only across time, while many video labels are visible in any single frame.

If a human could label the clip from one screenshot (scene type, presence of an object, most content categories), sample frames and use an image classifier or VLM: it is dramatically cheaper, easier to train, and easier to debug. Aggregating a few frame predictions per clip handles most practical cases.

Actions defined by temporal direction (opening versus closing, falling versus sitting, gesture dynamics) need models that see time: 3D convolutional networks or video transformers trained on clips. They cost more to train and serve, so reserve them for labels that genuinely live in the motion.

The bottom line: Ask whether one frame could carry the label: if yes, classify sampled frames; only pay for temporal models when the motion itself is the signal.

Frequently Asked Questions About Video Classification Models

Video classification is the task of assigning labels to whole video clips, recognizing actions and events that only exist across time, like "opening a box" versus "closing a box". Models add temporal modeling to image backbones: 3D convolutions, frame sampling with pooling, or video transformers that attend across frames. Top-1 accuracy on clip benchmarks is the standard measure. The temporal dimension separates it from image classification, and it is used for content moderation, action recognition in sports and fitness, workplace safety compliance, and indexing video libraries. This page lists 4 video classification models, including 2 open-weight options you can self-host; all of them run live in the Playground so you can test them on your own images.

It depends on your task and constraints. For fixed categories in production, a model fine-tuned on your own data typically beats any general-purpose model. Compare the video classification models on this page and try them on your own image to see which fits.

Yes. 2 of the 4 video classification models here are open-weight (for example Qwen3.6 27B and Qwen3.6 35B A3B), free to self-host under their licenses (Apache 2.0).

Yes. You can run all 4 in the Roboflow Playground for free. Upload an image and compare the models' output side by side, no setup required.

This page lists all 4 video classification models in the Roboflow Playground catalog: 2 open-weight models you can self-host and 2 proprietary models accessed through provider APIs; all of them run live in the Roboflow Playground on your own images. Compare licenses, parameters, API prices, and release dates side by side, or open any model page for full details.