Samsung DVD-VR375 DVD Recorder / VCR Combo

I bought this at BestBuy about 14 months ago after researching dvd recorders for reliability; none were good, but this was the best reported. I also bought an extended warranty, which I used after about 10 months when the video started stuttering and stalling during playback from pristine, clean dvds. That fixed the video, but I've continued to have problems with audio dropout about every 8-10 seconds, when playing any dvd. I don't know whether the problem is this Samsung dvd player, or whether it's the Samsung L32A450 television it connects to, but I suspect it's the player because of other reports on audio dropout over hdmi from Samsung players.
Encoding to dvd is so-so, with the video quality a lot lower than I'd expect from the bitrate being used. I'm recording hdtv feeds via a downconverter box, and the quality is noticeably worse than the output of the downconverter.
The remote is adequate, but incredibly ugly; I can't believe the same company designed this remote, and the remote for the tv (which is quite attractive). Menu operation with the remote is inconsistent, and you have to remember for each item whether return aborts or accepts the choice (or whether you need to hit enter instead): I've created quite a few coasters by thinking I've accepted a timed recording setup, but I've actually aborted it.
Finalizing is pretty slow; if you suffer a power outage during finalizing (I did), the recorder can neither load the dvd, nor finish finalizing it. I had to use a linux utility (dvdisaster) to rescue the contents of the disk and then record a new disk.
Power-on is _really_, painfully slow, and it takes a long time for it to load a disk, even a dvd that it's encoded.