Exercise Video APIs: Which Exercise Databases Serve Video

Most exercise APIs stop at text, still images or animated GIFs. This page narrows the exercise database API roundup to one question, which sources hand you demonstration video, and compares only what each provider's own pages and code say about media: formats, resolutions, watermarks, licence and price. Everything here was read on October 22, 2026, from a source-snapshot run or, for open-source code, from GitHub.

Who serves what#

MuscleWiki blocked our snapshot with a Cloudflare page, so it is not covered here.

ExerciseDB V2 by AscendAPI: an MP4 per exercise#

exercisedb.dev now presents itself as AscendAPI ("Previously ExerciseDB"), and its documentation describes two exercise products. ExerciseDB V2 is the video one. AscendAPI's docs say: "Each exercise includes an MP4 demonstration video for in-app playback." The record carries a videoUrl alongside imageUrl and an imageUrls object, and the docs list static images in four sizes, 360p, 480p, 720p and 1080p. AscendAPI's own figures are 11,000+ exercises, 15,000+ videos and 20,000+ images, which are vendor numbers we have not counted.

Access runs through RapidAPI: "Currently AscendAPI is accessed via RapidAPI." The free and paid tiers differ in one way the docs spell out: "free tier media is watermarked", while the paid tier "serves clean, watermark-free assets across all resolutions". AscendAPI's quickstart describes the free Basic plan as 2,000 requests a month, 200 exercises in the library, and exercise images and videos, with no credit card. Its rate-limiting guide gives free plans 1,000 requests per hour per API key, says paid plans "have no strict rate limit", and says media served through its CDN "is generally unlimited".

What we could not verify: paid plan prices, which AscendAPI's docs leave to its RapidAPI listing and which we did not read, and the licence terms for the video files. The earlier ExerciseDB listing on RapidAPI under the publisher justin-WFnsXH_t6 also rendered empty, so we cannot say whether it is the same product as AscendAPI's listings. Plan pricing in this category is tracked on exercise database API pricing.

ExerciseDB V1: GIFs, with a free tier that needs no key#

ExerciseDB V1 is the GIF product. Its free tier is "1,500 exercises with 180p GIFs. No authentication required", served at oss.exercisedb.dev/api/v1/exercises, and exercisedb.dev's home page says the same: "No sign-up, no API key". The paid V1 tier on RapidAPI adds imageUrls and gifUrls objects at 360p to 1080p. V1 has no video field. AscendAPI describes the whole V1 dataset as "over 2,000 structured exercises", more than the free tier's 1,500.

wger: video, if you host it#

wger is open-source software you run yourself, and its code supports exercise video. The ExerciseVideo model accepts files with the extensions mp4, mov, webm, ogv and ogg, up to 100 MB each, and records size, duration, width, height and codec. Each video inherits wger's licence fields, including the licence, the original title, the author and a link to the original object, so attribution travels with the file. The REST router registers a video endpoint.

Images are stills only. wger's image validator allows jpeg, jpg, png, webp and avif, and rejects animation with the message "Animated images are not supported." So wger has no GIF route: a moving demonstration goes in as a video.

Licensing, from wger's documentation: the application is AGPL 3 or later, and "The initial exercise and ingredient data is licensed additionally under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA 3.0)". How many videos the public wger.de instance carries we could not check, because wger.de answered our snapshot with a bot-check page. The trade-offs of running it are in ExerciseDB vs wger.

Still images only: API Ninjas and free-exercise-db#

API Ninjas Exercises returns no video. Its reference lists an images field as "Premium only": an "Array of image URLs showing the exercise, in movement order (usually the start and finish positions)". Its FAQ says commercial use "is not permitted on the free tier", and its pricing page says all paid plans are premium plans; the cheapest, Developer, is listed at $59 a month or $39 a month billed yearly.

free-exercise-db is a public-domain JSON dataset, 876 exercises with 1,746 JPG image paths when we counted its combined file on October 22, 2026 (its README says 800+), whose records point to JPG files which its README says you can fetch from raw.githubusercontent.com. There is no video or GIF.

Buying the videos instead: GymVisual#

If you want to own the files and serve them from your own storage, a stock library is the other route. GymVisual sells "royalty-free workout animations, GIFs, and fitness illustrations" and names app developers among the people its library is designed for. Its Videos category listed 9,935 products and its Animated GIFs category 6,558 when we read them. The category pages show volume pricing, "$6 per 1 video after 5 items in cart" and "$0.9 per 1 animated GIF after 10 items in cart"; the single-item prices were not on the pages we read.

The licence matters more than the price. GymVisual's Non-Exclusive Commercial Royalty-Free License means "you pay for the Media only once and then you can use it as many times as you like, with just a few restrictions", and its permitted uses include Android or iOS apps. Among the restrictions: no reselling or redistribution, no making files "available on a website for download", and no using them "to process, modify, or use for training by any Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems". The terms add that the licence is a one-person licence for the account owner and cannot be transferred. None of the GymVisual pages we read mentions an API, so you host, index and serve the files yourself.

Which should you pick?#

Our judgement, from the sources above:

• You want video from a hosted API today: ExerciseDB V2, starting on the watermarked free plan and moving to a paid plan for clean files. Confirm the price and the media licence on RapidAPI first.
• You want to own the stack and the licence trail: self-host wger and upload your own or licensed videos; each one carries its licence and author.
• You want files you control, without an API dependency: buy from a stock library such as GymVisual, after checking that its no-redistribution and no-AI-training terms fit your product.
• Stills are enough: API Ninjas on a paid plan, or free-exercise-db at no cost.

Full-length workout classes are a different product from per-exercise demonstrations, and we have not reviewed any. If what you need is to analyse the user's own movement on camera rather than play a demonstration, that is pose estimation: see AI workout tracking APIs.