Wednesday, March 13, 2013

GDAL Work to Support ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK v5 Almost Complete


To support the ERDAS ECW Plug-in for ArcGIS Desktop 10.1, work was done to add support for the ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK v5 into GDAL. The new ECW SDK adds support for ECW v3, which supports 16-bit data, RPC, statistics, histograms, and much more in the new ECW file format. The new ECW SDK also supports ECWP v3, which faster than ever.

In the process of working on the ArcGIS/GDAL work, we learned a few things that help the use of the SECW DK in GDAL, and these will be rolled into the final ECW SDK and GDAL products. You will see the GDAL changes about the same time the ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK v5 is released.

In addition to ECW v3 and ECWP v3 things noted above, the new SDK version will decode JP2 faster thatn ever. Our goal is to be faster than any other tools that decode JP2 data (go big or go home). The new ECW SDK will support Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 compiler and Linux.

So, when will the new ECW SDK v5 be released?

I have been asking the same thing. (I am not longer the ECW SDK Product manager). While I have not gotten a definitive answer, because we see the ECW SDK being used in ERDAS IMAGINE and ERDAS APOLLO 2013 products, many GeoMedia 2013 products, in ECW Plug-in for ArcGIS Desktop 10.1, and the GDAL work now complete (but not checked-in) we can know we are real close.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do you know if using gdal, the sdk v5 will produce only ECW v3, or will it be able to output also the older v2?

thanks

Paul said...

The ECW SDK v5 will decode and encode both ECW v2 and ECW v3 file formats. The v2 file format remains 100% backwards compatible.