There is a tremendous growth of digital data due to the stunning progress of digital devices which facilitates capturing them. Digital data include image, text, and video. Video represents a rich source of information. Thus, there is an urgent need to retrieve, organize, and automate videos. Video retrieval is a vital process in multimedia applications such as video search engines, digital museums, and video-on-demand broadcasting. In this paper, the different approaches of video retrieval are outlined and briefly categorized. Moreover, the different methods that bridge the semantic gap in video retrieval are discussed in more details.