I need some help importing MrSID Raster files in QGIS. I am running 2.6.0 on Linux Mint 17. After an internet search I have found a couple of resources that are perhaps outdated. The most promising is found here :
http://trac.osgeo.org/ubuntugis/wiki/TutorialMrSid
However when I attempted to follow the instructions my terminal and I could not find the file "libgdal-mrsid-src" on either the stable or unstable Ubuntu GIS repos. Has anyone had success or could lead me in the right direction?
I also found great difficulty with mrsid type files in my Linux Mint QGIS setup. A very simple solution was to install WINE from the mint software repository so that I could use some Windows programs. Then I downloaded a Mrsid viewer application for windows from the US Library of Congress that also can export a SID file as a GeoTiff. Worked perfectly, and the embedded projection info within the SID files was retained in the resulting GeoTiff. Each one takes about 5 seconds to convert. The viewer does not require that WINE have microsoft.net framework present, which is a problem with WINE. Viewer link here: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/help/download_sid.html
Quick and dirty, but gets my gis work done.
Compiling the LizardTech SDK in GDAL per link you reference is probably the best solution, but I also found this pretty daunting.
Here is another alternative for Linux - LizardTech now has their geoexpress command line utilities available for Linux, available at no cost (thanks LizardTech) - http://www.lizardtech.com/downloads/category/#tools__utilities
You can use the mrsidgeodecode utility to convert a mrsid file to several other image formats. I test with sid to geotif. Once you have a GDAL accessible file, you can easily handle and edit the file, with GDAL utilities, or QGIS.
