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

[Agustin Lobo]

Unfortunately, having to deal with ECW is not a matter of being maniacs
of proprietary formats but of many useful free geoinformation provided in
ECW format. Actually, not having ECW (or mrsid) support can be a cause
of not using qgis at all.

What about designing a separate external tool that would use gdal 1.6
for a fast conversion
of ECW to a fully gdal 1.7 supported compressed format? This would be
a temporary solution while
gdal finds a better solution for ECW support (best) or while ECW is
dropped by producers
of public geodata.

Agus

2010/10/18 Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>:
> Il 17/10/2010 22:00, Jürgen E. Fischer ha scritto:
>
>>> 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.
>
>> 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.
>
> One good reason to switch to gdal 1.7 is the support for RasterLite.
> Another is the bugfix with virtual raster that allows the removal of overlapping NULL
> values. I'm sure there are more good reasons (after all, FrankW and other have not
> worked in vain for a new GDAL version, right?).
> More generally, I think we should upgrade wen possible, to profit from the many
> improvements.
> AFAICT, we are now trapped in a choice: either using gdal 1.6 with ECW support, but
> with the limitations above, or move to 1.7, and drop ECW support (until the licence
> issues are clarified/solved).
> A third, more complicated way would be to have the two version in parallel.
> I agree: I also feel lucky having to deal with proprietary formats only rarely.
> All the best.
> --
> Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc
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