Techniques of playing back a looping video file involve providing multiple video codecs for decoding a video file. Each video codec performs its own decoding operation on the looping video file, resulting in multiple buffers of video frames and a buffer of audio frames. Then, as the GPU renders the ending video frames from a first buffer, it begins rendering the beginning video frames from a second buffer. In this way, the beginning of a next video cycle is already rendered for viewing by the time a current video cycle is ending.