i have still installed blender-2.49
and use the setting in bender-2.5x for ctrl-F11(replay animation)
to use this old blender-2.49-player. The setting is in the user-preferences.
If you dont want to have both versions installed, you need a special player,
that depends on your operation-system, what is available. Could be you might
need one player-prg. for images and another for rendered movie-codecs.
Next, what might be a solution: for quick-preview use avi-codecs and only for the final render in higher resolution go for single images and then use external program to combine those into one video (or use the blender-compositor)