Can flac or .ass files be muxed into a MP4 container?

[Cyber Akuma]

I have a MKV file that I wanted to convert into MP4, and avoid re-encoding as much as possible to preserve quality which is why I want to do it manually and avoid automated encoding tools such as handbrake.

After extracting it with MeGui I was left with a .h264 video file, .flac audio file, and a .ass subtitles file.

Any attempt to mux the .flac and/or .ass file into an MP4 container failed.

First of all, I want to ask if its even possible (without breaking standards and thus making the file incompatible with many devices) to put FLAC audio into an MP4 container?

If not then no problem, I can convert it to AAC, a bit of quality loss is acceptable if its the only way.

I have no idea what to do with the .ass subtitle file though since I have never worked with soft subtitles before, how can I mux this into an MP4 file without breaking any standards? Do I need to convert it into another format? And if so, how?

Finally, if I am forced to go with hard coded subtitles, what would be the best way to encode the video and subtitle track together? I am aware that this would mean I would need to re-encode the video and thus suffer some quality loss...

Thanks

[bat999]

First of all, I want to ask if its even possible (without breaking standards and thus making the file incompatible with many devices) to put FLAC audio into an MP4 container?

Hi
There's a chart at Wikipedia.
Here:-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_media_containers
It shows that flac audio isn't permitted in an mp4 container.

Maybe somebody else will advise about the subtitles.

[t0nee1]

I've not tried or had a need but, maybe try the MKV container instead, since the wiki posted states" virtually anything" can contain it...

[Cyber Akuma]

(sorry for bringing this back up)

Ok, so I need to re-encode the audio, that's not a problem, what can I do about the subtitles though?

[poisondeathray]

For hardcoding subs, you can use textsub() in avisynth . Use [search] as there are several guides and it's a topic frequently addressed

[Cornucopia]

For subs, since MP4 is based on QT/MOV, you ought to be able to mux in a QT (timed) Text track. There are a number of utilities that can convert from one sub format to another and I would guess that some of them cover QT Text as an export format. You'll possibly need QT Pro at some point in the process, though.
Do a google search on some combination of "Quicktime" "subtitles" "caption" and "SRT", and you should come up with a number of helpful hints on the process.

Scott