[wamatt]

>By that measure, a two-hour movie can be compressed down to 22.5 kilobytes... :-)

I can't speak for other's but for myself that sort of compression ratio seems at least possible.

Most of the conscious mind is dealing with a highly compressed stream of symbols (compressed abstracted versions of the actual audio-visual stream), and how they relate to one another in time and space.

More concretely, imagine yourself watching a movie in the theatre:

"That actor's accent is a bit off" "Why do her teeth look so bright?" "I forgot who directed this, hmm was it that Swedish guy.. the guy who directed 'Heaven', wait... was he Swedish? Aargh I wish I could go on IMDB now and check" ".. ugh that kid in the front row's phone is distracting" "The visual style reminds me of this other movie". "The music is getting ominous, something bad is about to happen." "Oh crap the main character is screwed, how he is going to escape this trap?" "I wonder if my gf is enjoying the movie?" etc

[idupree]

For each viewer, that seems likely to me. For viewers collectively, there is more information; some viewer's girlfriend is going to be someone who studies trees, and another viewer is going to think some character looks kind of like the President. This effect of viewer diversity might justify the video file being more than a megabyte!