Automatic video recommendation is described. The recommendation does not require an existing user profile. The source videos are directly compared to a user selected video to determine relevance, which is then used as a basis for video recommendation. The comparison is performed with respect to a weighted feature set including at least one content-based feature, such as a visual feature, an aural feature and a content-derived textural feature. Multimodal implementation including multimodal features (e.g., visual, aural and textural) extracted from the videos is used for more reliable relevance ranking. One embodiment uses an indirect textural feature generated by automatic text categorization based on a set of predefined category hierarchy. Another embodiment uses self-learning based on user click-through history to improve relevance ranking.