I am looking for a present for my parents. They are elderly and on fixed income so anything with a monthly fee like cable, Dish or TiVo is not an option. But they sure love their TV and at one time had 8 VCRs for recording every channel. With the switch to HD none of these work well even attached to the adaptor box. So I would like to get them something like a TV box with out the fees. Phillips has a DVDR3575 Hard disk.DVR recorder but it only has one tuner. I would really like to find something with 2 to 3 tuners for them
There's nothing with more than one tuner that's free to use. There's never been a dual tuner DVD recorder. If you want 2 tuners you'll have to buy 2 recorders.
I'm not sure what you mean by "none of these seem to work even when attached to the adaptor [sic] box".
Connect the video+audio out (yellow, red, white) on the digital adapter box to the video+audio in of the VCR. Then set the channel for the digital adapter box to the one you want to record, and set the VCR to record from Line1.