I used to be a big Brycer but dropped off to learn new things.  I recently came back to it and created a simple animation just for fun to show a friend what bryce can do.  Nothing fancy, just orbs rising from the water.  When I played it back though the animation is jumpy.  
      Never really had this problem before.  I have quite a few media players and tried them all but got the same result.  I went into task manager and shut down everything but core functions thinking it was a memory problem but same result.  Granted this is the first render that I have done with 5.5 so that may be it.  Dont really matter just wondering.  Any ideas?

Jumpy can be a problem with the codec used. What format did you save the animation to and which compression codec?

You could try converting it to another codec.

I'd love to see the animation, by-theway, and try converting too. Do you have it as a numbered image sequence? or AVI?

Did you do it on a Mac or PC?

When you slowly scrub through the animation in a movie player like Irfanview do you see any jumping forward or back or anything abnormal indicating there's a rendering problem with camera moves etc or do the frames look just about right in sequence without erratic moves frame to frame?

Note also that some movie players can be configured for full acceleration, but sometimes it's better to try without, or if there's a problem in your graphics card's video driver, or a spyware that steals frames to an IP address it will cause interference like stop and go jumpiness. on and off.

Sometimes if all else fails, then doing a bitmap sequence and using another software to piece together the animation is the best solution. It's not the easiest one, but most likely to work.

I got that once, but there I had the number of frames per second set wrong - i.e. too few.  When I did the same animation but at a higher rate say... 30 frames per second - it came out just fine.

that is also one thing to look out for: there are many codecs (compressions) to choose from in AVI production or Quicktime and some work better at certain resolutions like when images are multiple of 8 pixels in width and height. Others must be multiple of 4. Others don't care. And others again must use certain frame rates, such as 25 fps. 

Can yu shed some light on what you tried in the first place?  did you save to AVI? Quicktime? and which codec and settings?