Actually, "encoding with divx" is surprisingly close to what your eyes are doing with every scene and every image they look at. There are neural mechanisms in the eye that perform edge detection and motion detection, not bothering to transmit information about areas of a single colour, so that the information that is actually transmitted to the brain is a heavily simplified, stylised, and encoded version of the image projected onto the retina. Indeed, one of many remarkable aspects of the human visual system is how little the information transferred to the visual cortex really resembles that image, and how marvellously adept is the brain at converting that encoded information into the visual experience that we perceive. In fact, one objective of video encoding is to account with increasing sophistication for the ways that the eye pre-processes visual information, in order to provide the smallest data size possible that gives an image that will be perceived similarly to a scene transmitted "raw" and unprocessed, and with much more information.