I have a Hitachi DVD Player P415u and have had difficulty playing DVD-R. As in another post, it sort of plays but encounters many skips. This appears to be media related. I have had not problems with Princo or with Maxell. Pine, Verbatim, Sony, Memorex do not work well with this player. I have not tested Fuji which one person has reported works well.

The disks that worked well we recorded at 2 to 4 times speed, using Adobe DVD encore and the new LG 4040b on a windows xp p4 2.4ghz machine.

So before you trade in your player because it doesn't play your home movies try princo or maxell. (the player also works well for mp3 and vcd, and svcd)