closed captions preservation in H.264 to Mpeg-2 IP streams?

[marks47]

Realizing this has come up on multiple threads and forums, I'm getting a little desperate to come up with a solution that works...

I've not found a single solution that works for VLC (or FFMPEG) to have an H.264 stream sent across a slow-ish link, transcode it, and keep the CC's available for turning off/on (ie-no "hard" burning into the stream)
The closest I've found is posts saying to specify the caption stream by adding a -copy flag in the command line (vlc and ffmpeg) but it doesn't ever seem to work going between these formats.
I'd appreciate any help on this.

Nothing "special" about the stream...H.264 in origin for bandwidth savings... Shows up on VLC just fine on the other side... But as soon as I change the resolution or format in any way, poof.
ffmpeg and vlc both seem to have flags for copying cc streams, but they never work, I assume, due to format, or the way CC's are embedded in the overscan or whatever.

Thanks for any insight

[usually_quiet]

Closed captions are often stored in the GOP user data for MPEG-2 and H.264. Even when re-encoding to the same format, encoders don't seem to copy closed captions stored in the source video to the re-encoded video. (At least I have not seen any which do that.) I have only seen encoders (commercial software) which can add closed caption data sourced from a separate closed caption stream or file.

[marks47]

Thanks for the info. I'm seeing the same thing. Even hardware transcoders I'm looking at, often neglect to mention whether CC works in their product specs... Which I think is special code for "does not support!"

[KarMa]

CCextractor works the best for extracting CC subs, but you will have to mux in the extracted subtitles