Right so I just recently got a slightly older LG with a similar A/D chip (SAA7137*). I seemed quite solid on my quick and dirty test but YMMV. It didn't do much horizontal jitter and tearing like e.g Panasonic DMR-ES10 does. A downside is that you can't adjust brightness/contrast on these so you have to hope the automatic gain control will avoid clipping bright and/or dark spots.
It's possible to capture from the HDMI ports though you may need a HDMI that can strip the HDCP copy protection like
this (worked with one I bought a few months). Don't think there is a big difference between capturing from HDMI and capturing with a decent analog capture card from the S-Video or component ports though.
Also, a DVD recorder will typically output macrovision, either all the time or when it thinks the content is copy-protected, which not all capture cards handle well.