[Qgis-user] Re: QGIS 1.5 Update for ECW/SID support crashes

[Jürgen E. Fischer]

Hi guys,

On Sun, 17. Oct 2010 at 10:31:53 -0700, Mike Toews wrote:
> On 17 October 2010 05:22, Francesco Parisi <fragger at altervista.org> wrote:
> > is this *old* sdk still avalable for donwnload?
 
> Also, there are no plans (at the moment) to support ECW in GDAL >=
> 1.7, which is bad news if you want to use QGIS >= 1.6.

Would you guys please stop to say that?

GDAL supports ECW[1] and in turn QGIS does.

It's just that it doesn't support the current SDK for legal reasons (AFAIK new
restrictions and licensing issues) and requires the old one.  And the old SDK
is not available _from ERDAS_ anymore.

And there is no ECW plugin for GDAL 1.7 in OSGeo4W and there is no intent to
create one because of the above issues.  But it shouldn't be a problem to build
one using the old SDK.

Moreover it has been repeatly stated that QGIS doesn't even require GDAL 1.7.
It works fine with 1.6 (and even 1.5).  QGIS 1.5 in OSGeo4W and the standalone
windows installer use GDAL 1.6 and there's nothing that forces us to switch to
GDAL 1.7 with QGIS 1.6 - both ECW and MrSID are there already.

And from what I hear ERDAS intends to support other platforms than Windows -
they just released on their main and therefore most important platform first.
And they advertise GDAL as API for ECW - so it looks like they have GDAL
support for the new SDK.  Maybe it helps if interested parties talk to ERDAS.

Anyway, I'm glad that I only have to deal with rasters in formats that require
proprietary software very rarely.


Jürgen

[1] http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/ECW

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