Help with Landsat ARD Metadata?

[SandhillSasquatch]

So i've been using landsat data for some of the research that I do, and the application I use if ENVI. I haven't had too much difficulty, it has a built in feature to open georeferenced files with metadata just by opening the MTL.txt that the landsat data generates when you unzip it.

However, the new Analysis Ready Data (ARD) that I really want to try and use, generates a .xml file for the metadata and ENVI doesn't know what to do with it. I've tried converting to a .txt and changing the name, but that didn't work.

Anyone else get the ARD to work, or am I just using it wrong?

[mamadouba]

The .MTL.txt is a text file and the ARD .xml is an XML.  You cannot just change the extension and expect an xml schema to be parsed like the text file.  Harris has not developed a parser for this yet, but they will likely do it in the future just like reading in Sentinel-2 .xml.  

In the mean time, you can simply develop your code in IDL to parse the XML file and pull the metadata of interest.  Those parameters can be used in an ENVITask workflow chain.  I had to do this when the Collection-1 MTL changed from the original and broke the ENVI parser.  The GeoTiFF itself will open like any other image.