This a so-called rare copy of Encarta '96 Encyclopedia MPEG Edition OEM. Somebody on archive.org said that this Sony RTE-3000 Digital Authoring studio version of this product I got is rare. Let get in to the comparison.
There are 3 different versions of Encarta '96 Encyclopedia below:
Microsoft Encarta 96 (OEM or Retail)
Microsoft Encarta 96 MPEG Edition (OEM)
Microsoft Encarta 96 Digital Authoring Studio (MPEG) Sony RTE-3000 (OEM and RARE as mentioned)
Here are the differences over videos:
The differences between the MPEG Edition and Sony RTE-3000 encoding seem to be in the quality of the videos only, and the difference is minimal. However, the Sony RTE-3000 encoded videos seem to look slightly better than the MPEG edition, which is much higher quality than the standard edition.
Over improving the video quality over the standard edition, some things were lost. The video quantity went from 56 down to 40 (We've lost 16 videos), and from 8 Interactivities to 7 (We've lost 1 interactivity) on this version.
Disc space became less of an issue with Deluxe Editions and then subsequent Deluxe Edition DVDs or Reference Suite DVDs. I do not have time to compare all of the editions unfortunately.
