ACI - allow better container creation automation options

I'm using the 'az container create -f file.yml' option to create aci containers, this works really well, but I'd like to automate this through my pipeline, and not have any credentials or container tags hard-wired in the yml

I'd like to be able to do
sed -e "s|DEPLOY_TAG|${i}|g" ./aci.yml | az container create --registry-login-server ${ACR_NAME}.azurecr.io --registry-password $ACR_PASSWD --registry-username $ACR_NAME -f -

unfortunately, "-f -" doesn't read from stdin, as many linux commands do, and
if I combined the options "-f" and the" --registry-*" options so to not embed the creds in the yml, this shows a error " Please check the image and registry credential"

Thank you for considering this.