MrSID files

MrSID is a proprietary compressed image file format of [LizardTech] It has become very popular for GIS files, especially orthophotos because it is efficient and lossless.

It is proprietary so it's not supported in GRASS.

But all is not lost! The kindly folk at LizardTech supply a free decoder. It is available for Windows, Linux and Solaris. It will convert MrSID images to JPG, GeoTIFF image formats. It can also scale images, extract part of an image, and a few other things...

Go to the downloads area at the LizardTech site and look for "MrSID Decode"

For example, to convert a Corvallis orthophoto to a GeoTIFF

mrsiddecode -of tifg -i 11s5w15f_color_sw.sid -o ~/workspace/11s5w15f_color_sw.tif

The "-of tifg" tells it to generate a GeoTIFF not just a plain image TIFF. By default it will give a progress indicator. You can turn this off if you want. Output for the above command looked like this:

mrsiddecode: (c) 2004 LizardTech, Inc. All rights reserved.


input:
  width:         5501
  height:        6200
  upper-left X:  1273797.814000
  upper-left Y:  358042.349000
  X scale:       0.500000
  Y scale:       -0.500000

output:
  width:         5501
  height:        6200
  upper-left X:  1273797.814000
  upper-left Y:  358042.349000
  X scale:       0.500000
  Y scale:       -0.500000
  format:        GeoTIFF