So I'm a worker bee at a small market TV station. Most of our syndication comes in automatically to our air server(s) and doesn't need tweaking. We still get a few linear satellite feeds that need ingesting and "handling". I brought in my openbox s10 FTA sat receiver as a proof of concept. Stuff from G16-18 and 19 we've been taking standard def feeds of because it's all we can handle.

openbox records to a USB hard drive in splendid 720p high def. I run this through tsmuxer to dump the spanish audio, even though the boss thinks it'll go through fine. One thing at a time, we agree. tsmuxer also sews together the 1 GB TS files the openbox generates into a seamless file... approx 6 GB for a 1/2 hour show.

Anyway. We have to resample, down, the transport/program stream because our automation server card (made by Vela (?) ) can't handle more than 25MBps. The transport/program stream is about 32 MBps. We love ffmpeg and have a preset to do this. It, however, swallows closed captions.

It does NOT swallow them if I do a videocodec copy command. (The server can't handle the AC3 audio either so I have it switching to mp2) But if I resample mpeg2 to mpeg2 (smaller) the captions disappear. I am excited to be handling things in software and not doing the alternative, receiver to SDI to server with MJPEG compression to converting to MPEG2. (Which, BTW, we can't caption either. Though a raw MJPEG playback works.)

Have found a reference to the -scodec copy or -scodec cc commands but am not having luck with them. Version is the "newest stable" ffmpeg-20120424-git-3bbf3f7-win32-static\bin.