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 <[email protected]>: > 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 > _______________________________________________ > Qgis-user mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user > _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
