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.
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.
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.
Well that does seem to be Microsoft's position at least. (see: Copilot)