What’s also important to know is that the commercial license (IIRC) doesn’t include access to the patent pool. I presume that when going through the commercial license the x264/x265 people will walk you through or otherwise assist in the MPEG-LA stuff:

https://www.mpegla.com/

It trips people up: the commercial x264/x265 license provides alternate use terms on the implementation. The implementation, however, is still protected by various patents worldwide and MPEG-LA is who you go through for access to the patent pool which is (supposed to) include payment to all of the identified patent holders.

IANAL the patent are required only if your devices does not already have an H.264/H.265 license.

H.264 is fine as it is literally the MP3 of Video. H.265 is a lot more complicated.

That is true but if you’re using libx264/libx265 you’re not using hardware encode/decode blocks that include the patent license so MPEG-LA is back in the picture.

Again IANAL but license are per devices and not per IP blocks so you dont double pay for each and every components ( Hardware Encode Decode in CPU and GPU ). And generally speaking that is up to the OEM and Devices Manufactures to have it done.

IANAL disclaimer as well but each component (hardware block, x264/x265 instance) is (IIRC) considered a separate "unit" [0].

[0] Slide 10, bullet one https://www.mpegla.com/wp-content/uploads/avcweb.pdf