[Gdal-dev] Problems with gdal_merge-created geotiffs

[Ken Boss]

Hello Frank--

I created a series of tiled geotiffs with gdal_merge.py from gdal-1.3.0 on Solaris.  Now I want to translate them to ECW (with FWTools-1.0.0a5 on Windows), but for some (not all) of them I get:

ERROR 1: d:\ip_scratch_space\pod1997.tif:0: Invalid strip byte count, strip 0
ERROR 1: TIFFReadEncodedStrip() failed.

ERROR 1: IReadBlock failed at X offset 0, Y offset 0
ERROR 1: GetBlockRef failed at X block offset 0, Y block offset 0

All of the problem images contain significant offsite.  I can display them without difficulty in a couple of commercial packages and OpenEV, but I can't process them with gdal.  This looks like http://bugzilla.remotesensing.org/show_bug.cgi?id=329.  

I've worked around the problem by recreating the images using the -init argument to gdal_merge.py, which works fine, but perhaps that bug could still be squashed?  I can provide a sample problem image if that would help...

--Ken Boss
  MN DNR Forestry