We should have had WED 1.4 beta days ago, but we do not. And the reason we do not is that some .jp2 files from the USGS do not import properly into WED. Others do, but going the ones that don’t are very common, and going beta with .jp2 files not working is asking for one hundred copies of the same bug to be filed within a day.

I now have a nasty hackworkaround for the problem: WED recognizes the particular projection that the problematic .jp2 files have and replaces the projection information with something the libraries we use can understand. This is a very brittle work-around but for now it’s all I can do.  I’ll post again when the beta goes live.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

11 comments on “GeoJP2K Makes Me Want to Stab Myself (or Where is WED)?

  1. In WED 1.2 (MAC)
    Convert USGS JP2K into TIFFs using Contenta Converter.
    Convert USGS JP2K into 2048×2048 PNGs with Photo Convert
    Place one TIFF at a time in WED
    Place the corresponding PNG
    Eliminate the TIFF
    Highlight the PNG – make draped polygon
    Voilà.

    1. Wed 1.3 will automatically convert geotiff to a drapped pol, so you don’t have to go through all of those steps. You just import the image and you’re done. however I filed a bug because it doesn’t work with images which lack georeferencing, such as pngs and desert.

  2. Perhaps my so-called ‘work experience’ over the .jp2 files could be something helpful. My Linux distro Ubuntu 14.04 can not perceive adequately any .jp2 files. When a file .jp2 will appear into a folder, I cannot to close this folder properly, because a few second later the folder closes itself. This is a BUG of Ubuntu, maybe, more precisely, is exactly. So I just deleted all jpeg2000 files.

    Good luck.

  3. At work I’ve used the open-source GDAL package to translate .jp2 files to geotiffs. I used “gdal_translate” to convert the “.jp2” into to a “.tiff” and then used “geotifcp” to merge the “.tiff” and the USGS associated “world-file” (I think it has a “.jpw” suffix?) into a geotiff.

    Might try that bit of magic if your own magic is hitting a wall.

    1. That might become the standard procedure. As of this morning the only bug we have with WED is crashes. And the crashes are in Geo-JPEG2K import.

      1. Ben,

        Will you allow WED to process the jp2 files that import without
        failing and issue a warning that we have to manually convert those files that WED can’t process?

        “Good Luck, we’re all counting on you.”

      2. Are you saying those steps will be rolled/coded into a WED menu option or they’ll need to be done externally?

        1. If we don’t support JPEG 2000 as a file format they’ll have to be done externally.

          The original goal of supporting JPEG-2000 was to automate the process of using JPEG-2000 data so it “just worked”. But if it’s going to just work except for when it doesn’t work or crashes, then I don’t want to keep the feature.

          The rest of the GIS world copes with Geo-JPEG 2000 by immediately converting it to GeoTIFF using one of a small number of programs and then getting on with it; Geo-JPEG 2000 has absolutely not replaced GeoTIFF as an interchange format. If we can’t get WED to support JP2 without crashing then X-plane users will have to convert files by hand.

Comments are closed.