Has anyone thought of trying to end-to-end train an h.265 decoder? The results might not be 100% perfect, but the resulting codec might bypass a ton of patents.
The premise was using e2e learning to avoid patent issues. I am sure that with some preprocessing you can plug a NN inside the deciding process and learn very meaningful stuff.
I've tried them, the current state of the art means that they're only useful on relatively static things (some shaking etc) while spike up to AV1-level bitrate to reach perceptual similarity when the movement is too much. Maybe in the future (or whatever under the wraps concoction Nvidia, Qualcomm or another player have), ML-based video codecs will surpass handtuned codecs, but it's not (yet) the present state.
Well that does seem to be Microsoft's position at least. (see: Copilot)