.ass subtitles refuse to hard embed into mp4

[peacemaster]

I have a problem and I have tried everything I can think of and spent two days trying to solve this issue.

I have a video file, it happens to be mp4 but I am not worried about the format really. Its in a foreign language and I want to have TWO subtitles displayed simultaneously, i.e one at the top of screen and one at the bottom. I have two SRT files of each subtitle track and I merged them on a website called srt2ass and it merged them fine but into an .ass file.

I opened VLC and selected them to be displayed and it worked PERFECTLY. so I know the .ass file is merged and works....heres the problem.....
I want to HARD embed them into a video file....the reason I want to do this is so I can load the resulting file onto a memory stick and view it on any device I want.
I went to convert....I selected the video and subtitle, left all settings to default apart from under the subtitle tab I checked the check boxes to say overlay the subtitles on video....the file them chugged along in real time I presume converting becuase it took around and hour and a half, i.e the full length of the film but every single time the resulting file plays fine but there are no subtitles hard embedded on the file....I have tested it on linux ubuntu system and windows and both times the process fails to have the subtitles embedded and viewable...any help guys?

[kodela]

Try it with the version 2.0.8.

Select the option Destination subtitle codec in the
Preferences - All - Stream output - Sout stream - Transcode.