Many video platforms rely on the descriptions that uploaders provide for video retrieval. However, this reliance may cause inaccuracies. Although deep learning-based video captioning can resolve this problem, it has some limitations: (1) traditional keyframe extraction techniques do not consider video length/content, resulting in low accuracy, high storage requirements, and long processing times; (2) Arabic language support in video captioning is not extensive. This study proposes a new video captioning approach that uses an efficient keyframe extraction method and supports both Arabic and English. The proposed keyframe extraction technique uses time- and content-based approaches for better quality captions, fewer storage space requirements, and faster processing. The English and Arabic models use a sequence-to-sequence framework with long short-term memory in both the encoder and decoder. Both models were evaluated on caption quality using four metrics: bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU), metric for evaluation of translation with explicit ORdering (METEOR), recall-oriented understudy of gisting evaluation (ROUGE-L), and consensus-based image description evaluation (CIDE-r). They were also evaluated using cosine similarity to determine their suitability for video retrieval. The results demonstrated that the English model performed better with regards to caption quality and video retrieval. In terms of BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE-L, and CIDE-r, the English model scored 47.18, 30.46, 62.07, and 59.98, respectively, whereas the Arabic model scored 21.65, 36.30, 44.897, and 45.52, respectively. According to the video retrieval, the English and Arabic models successfully retrieved 67% and 40% of the videos, respectively, with 20% similarity. These models have potential applications in storytelling, sports commentaries, and video surveillance.