Three AI Video Inputs, One Integration Boundary: Shipping MiniMax H3 on RouterBase

MiniMax H3 is now available on RouterBase through three video-generation routes: text-to-video, image-to-video, and reference-to-video.

Those labels sound like three separate products. From an application architecture perspective, they are better treated as three input contracts around the same asynchronous job lifecycle.

The lifecycle is familiar:

1. Submit a generation job.
2. Store the returned task identifier.
3. Poll until the task reaches a terminal state.
4. Retrieve the completed video URL.
5. Copy the asset into storage you control if the result needs to remain available.

What changes is the context you send at step one.

Use text-to-video when the scene can be described from scratch. It is the cleanest route for exploration, storyboard alternatives, and prompts where no existing visual identity needs to survive.

Use image-to-video when you already have the opening visual. The source image becomes the anchor, while the prompt should describe motion, camera behavior, and what must remain unchanged.

Use reference-to-video when the input is guidance rather than the literal first frame. This is the better fit for a subject, product, or visual style that should influence the generated clip.

On RouterBase, the currently published MiniMax H3 routes support 2K output and 6- or 10-second clips. That is a narrower product contract than every capability described in MiniMax’s own H3 documentation, so production code should follow the RouterBase route you are actually calling—not assume that every upstream option is already exposed.

A useful abstraction is to keep your queue, polling, timeout, retry, storage, and audit logic independent from the selected input mode. Then changing from a prompt to a source image is a request-shape decision, not a second integration project.

Explore the live routes

• Text-to-video: https://routerbase.com/models/minimax/minimax-h3/text-to-video
• Image-to-video: https://routerbase.com/models/minimax/minimax-h3/image-to-video
• Reference-to-video: https://routerbase.com/models/minimax/minimax-h3/reference-to-video

The practical question is no longer only “Which video model should we call?” It is also “What context do we already have, and what role should that context play?”