Me vs. the machines, pt. 2

[gwyn]

I wonder if someone who's more technologically adept can answer this question. I got a dvd recorder for my A/V system recently, and have begun transferring over some of my tapes to disc, starting with my beloved Now and Again. Today I made a disc from a tape, finalized it, and it chaptered through it to test how everything looks. I found this constant pixelization all the way through, with sound dropouts, stuttering, etc. I didn't notice this on the first tape, so I took the disc and played it in my Mac dvd player. It looks flawless, no pixels on the same spots it was terrible in on the recorder. It's a Samsung recorder, very good quality, and I thought initially it must be the tape player, because it's a crappy Panasonic S-VHS that has never stopped giving me trouble. I thought maybe tape dropouts were causing it, but it looks fine on the computer. What's likely to cause such a viewing discrepancy? When it doesn't pixelize, it looks perfect. Is this some kind of playback problem? Is something wrong in the signal? I just don't know why it would look that bad on its own source machine, but not elsewhere. I haven't yet tested it out in my Sony, though. And the media is good old Ritek discs, which have never caused me trouble.