GDAL ECW 5.5 plugin GISInternals

GDAL ECW 5.5 plugin is a software tool designed to enable reading and writing of ECW (Enhanced Compressed Wavelets) and JP2ECW (ERDAS JPEG2000) raster files within the GDAL framework. This plugin provides essential support for these file formats, allowing users to work with geospatial data efficiently.

Key Features:

• Support for reading and writing ECW and JP2ECW files using the ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK.
• Capabilities include creating copies of datasets (CreateCopy) and supporting georeferencing operations.
• Licensing options that allow free decoding for desktop use, with compression requiring a purchased license from Hexagon Geospatial.
• Support for both 8-bit and 16-bit per channel data types in ECW Version 3 files.
• Creation options to customize output settings such as compression rate, target size reduction, and file format version.

Audience & Benefit: Ideal for GIS professionals, researchers, and developers working with geospatial raster data. The plugin enables efficient handling of compressed raster formats, facilitating workflows that involve large datasets. Users benefit from the ability to work with ECW files without additional costs for decoding, while compression capabilities require a license for production use.

This plugin can be installed via winget as part of GDAL distributions.