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

[Micha Silver]

  On 18/10/2010 13:58, Agustin Lobo wrote:
> This is why having a single, simple, external program for the
> conversion is more efficient: keeping several versions
> of qgis or using fwtools is going to complicate the installations of
> many users. Shiping qgis along with a simple ecw2openjpg
> (in case that's the best option) would be a good compromise.
>
> Agus
>
Maybe one day Jpeg2000 will get to the quality and stability 
of ECW. But AFAIK, the open source drivers are still pretty 
much alpha quality. I'd be pleased to hear that I am wrong in 
making that statement.  The good JP2K driver is the Kakadu 
proprietary one :-( supplied together with ECW.
Converting compressed images back to GeoTiff means sometimes a 
50X (!) increase in file size. With HiRes ortho-photos that 
becomes quite a burden on disk size, even with today's disk sizes.
So I still think we're unfortunately stuck with ECW for a 
while (at least till a good OSS library for jpeg2000 matures).


-- 
Micha Silver
http://www.surfaces.co.il/
Arava Development Co.  +972-52-3665918