Working sensibly with several chess engines and a chess database is only possible if you can save multiple chess notations or positions compactly in a single file. A serious problem in the early days of computer chess was that every chess program came with its own proprietary data format that was almost never compatible with other programs. There was simply no standard for storing games and positions. Meanwhile the situation has changed fundamentally and several standards have become established with which you can efficiently manage your data and exchange it with other programs or users.
Information on the Chess Media Format ......
You will most often be confronted with the following data formats when using chess software:
• CBH format A further development of the CBF format described below is the CBH format introduced with the market launch of ChessBase 6.0. In the multimedia age, the limits of the CBF format became apparent, since it did not allow the integration of graphics, videos, sound, etc. Compared to the CBF format, the CBH format offers significant advantages: in addition to variations and text, various multimedia components can be inserted and saved. Coloured markings on the chessboard, graphics, sound, videos, training questions in the notation, or support for different languages considerably extend the functionality of ChessBase and the in-house chess engines.
• PGN format The PGN format has become established as a standard for saving chess games, especially on the internet. The reason: unlike specialised, complex file formats, PGN is based on pure ASCII text. Since the data is stored as plain text, you can process the notations with any text editor. In addition to the notations, PGN files contain information such as the player names, year, result, opening code, comments, and variations. A PGN file can contain multiple games as well as pure chess positions. Disadvantage: with large game collections, the PGN format requires significantly more disk space than the specialised file formats.
• EPD format The EPD format is likewise based on pure ASCII text and is used exclusively for storing chess positions. An EPD file can contain multiple positions. Like the PGN format, EPD is a popular format on the internet. Reason: the structure of the internal data formats of commercial chess software is generally not documented or freely available. For this reason, data formats were developed that are based on pure ASCII text and whose documentation is accessible to anyone.
• CBF format The CBF format originates from ChessBase 3/4 and is now used by many commercial chess engines. In addition to the pure game notation, CBF files can contain variations along with sub-variations and text comments. When replaying a game, the texts and variations are displayed in the notation. A CBF file can contain either games or only position fragments. In addition to the pure notation, a wealth of other important information is stored for each game. Besides the moves, you can save player names, year, result, opening code, comments and variations in a CBF database. A great advantage of the CBF format is that the data is stored very compactly and requires much less disk capacity. A further plus: a CBF database always consists of only two files. This makes handling CBF databases very transparent and clear for the user.