Compiling gdal with ECW and MrSID support

Well I wanted to generate an mbtiles database of some imagery using raster2mb, a python script based off of gdal2tiles, but the imagery was in ECW format.  I wanted to do this to use as a baselayer on the Mapbox ipad app.

I had gdal (geospatial data abstratcion layer) installed but the binary available from the repositories does not include this support built in.  So, svn checkout the latest stable trunk of gdal and find the libecwj2_3.3-1_i386.deb (that is not trivial as ERmapper doesn't support linux in their new SDK builds[4.2] and they don't host version 3.3 anymore alas I found someone hosting it on mediafire, remember Google is your friend)

Building gdal from source tips and hints found here.  Find yourself the aforementioned ECW sdk library(read only, the code is proprietary and to write this file type you have to pay for a license, but reading from and then converting to a more friendly format can be done with the r/o sdk).

While you're at it might as well download the MrSID SDK(free registration required) and add it to your ./configure arguments because lot's of data is available in this format freely and it'd be nice to manipulate it/convert it with gdal.

good luck. :)

gdalwarp -t_srs EPSG:900913 -of GTiff dallas.ecw dallas.tif
Creating output file that is 43163P x 50580L.
Processing input file dallas.ecw