I have an interesting issue with playback of animations. I uploaded a test animation blast to Vimeo, and it is smooth as silk in every browser except IE Explorer, and so I did some local tests. I found out that VLC and other playback applications were very smooth, while using Windows Media Player resulted in the same "bumps" in the same places as IE Explorer did from Vimeo.
What this implies to me is that for an animation to be perfect over Windows Media Player requires some optimization. I don't know if it has a preferred number of frames per second or if it requires header information that Blender did not put in the output file, or if it is something else. I used h.264 and output as an AVI file. Perhaps the combination is problematic? Searching for answers.