Scidb supports the following formats:

• Scidb
• Scid
• ChessBase
• PGN
• Database archive

Scidb (.sci)

This is Scidb's own database format. Use of this format is strongly recommended because of speed and feature completeness considerations.

Only Scidb's format (and PGN format) is storing games of various chess variants (⇒Supported chess variants). A database is fixed to one chess variant (the Clipbase is an exception).

Furthermore this format is supporting Chess 960 , and Shuffle Chess  positions, in all chess variants.

Scidb databases are always encoded with character set UTF-8. Hence these databases can be used without any complications under all systems and locations.

A database in Scidb's format is divided into several files:

Only the files with suffixes .sci, .scg, and .scn are mandatory, others only if required.

The icon set (.scj) will be created when image files are selected inside the selection dialog for the database icon (⇒ database switcher

Scid (.si4, .si3)

Scid's database format is fully supported because of it's wide adoption. But with this format you cannot use the full capability of Scidb.

In some cases the user has to choose the appropriate encoding when opening the database, to ensure a correct display of names and other text. Newer databases may be UTF-8 encoded, older database may be written with Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set, the Scid format does not provide information about this. But in many cases the automatic detection of the character set should be successful.

This format resembles structurally Scidb's format:

The files with suffixes .sso (Scid Search Option File), .sor (Scid Repertoire File), and .stm (Scid Tree Mask File), do not belong explicitely to a database and will not be regarded by Scidb. Likewise any saved game list (file suffix .txt) will be disregarded.

ChessBase (.cbh, .cbf)

Both formats will be supported; the new format .cbh and the old format .cbf.

The company ChessBase  keeps this format secret, therefore only the reading mode is supported. Not all game data can be read correctly, with some games the message of failed decoding will appear.

Usually this database is encoded with character set CP1252 (or CP850 with old format), but in some cases a manual selection of the the character set when opening the database may be required, to ensure a correct display of names and other text.

A database in ChessBase format is divided into many separate files, the important ones are:

A database in old format consists of only four files:

PGN (.pgn, .pgn.gz, .zip)

The PGN format (Portable Game Notation) is a common standard for transfering chess games. Opening a PGN file will be done in reading mode, but it is possible to set it writeable (except Zip archives; ⇒ Write protection of databases). With larger PGN game collections it is recommended to convert it into the Scidb format.

According to the PGN standard  a PGN file is encoded with character set Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1). But if a PGN file is starting with an UTF-8 mark (UTF-8-BOM: byte sequence EF BB BF) an UTF-8 encoding will be expected (according to Unicode FAQ ). If the application is detecting an Unicode string when reading the file before a string with a different encoding (except ASCII) was recognized, then also Unicode encoding for the whole file will be expected, but only if not an explicit encoding is chosen when opening the file.

Only the following variants will be accepted if reading FICS games:

A complete specification of this format will be found at Standard: Portable Game Notation Specification and Implementation Guide .

Database archive (.scv)

Scidb's database archive is based on an independent archive format, and contains one (or perhaps several) databases in archived form. This facilitates the shipment of databases through the internet, because it is a single file instead of several ones. This database archive is not limited to a specific database format.

A detailed description of this format is on page Specification of database archive.