[mriguy67]

I have a question. Arent a lot of vcr’s made yrs ago already have a digital tuner and couldnt you use that instead of a converter box?

[Outland]

Nope. Wrong type of "digital" tuner.

The tuner in your old VCR (or in any receiver these days) is digitally controlled. When digitally controlled tuners were first used, they were also referred to as "digital tuners".  However, they won't tune in a narrow-band digital broadcast.  Even if they could, there would then be the matter of decoding the encoded broadcast.  TVs today are computers for the most part.