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Cascade Help

Storage Options

Video Storage and Hosting

YouTube is the recommended storage and hosting solution for video. However, before you upload a video to YouTube, we recommend you contact your Cascade manager to inquire about any existing YouTube accounts or preferred practices for your department, area or school. If your manager recommends you create a new account, follow our recommended guidelines on creating a new social media account at W&M.

Once your video is uploaded to YouTube and follows the requirements below, Cascade offers multiple solutions for incorporating it within your site — embedding a YouTube video within the content area at various sizes, or creating a YouTube Widget for use in the right-hand column.

Video Requirements

Videos must include closed captions in order to be accessible. You can use YouTube's auto-generate function, but you must manually review them as they are only about 95% accurate and often incorrectly display proper nouns. You can also enlist the help of a captioning service to caption your videos for you.

Due to YouTube terms of service, all videos on our Cascade websites must be designated "not made for kids" (general audience) in YouTube Studio. Our recommendation is to only embed videos from an official W&M channel to help ensure this practice is followed.

Other Large File Storage

Other media files (and significantly large files of any type) should also not be uploaded directly into Cascade. We have created a virtual host called media.wm.edu that all Cascade users may use for large file or media storage. For PDFs that exceed the file size limit you can first try the online tool SmallPDF to compress your PDF (using this site you can also merge and split PDFs and convert PPT, JPG, Excel or Word documents to PDF).

Here's the process to access media.wm.edu:

  1. Send a message to [[creative]] requesting access to media.wm.edu. Include your W&M Username and your Cascade website.
  2. When you get the response that your W&M Username has been granted access, map a network drive to \\jonesfiles.campus.wm.edu\virtualhosts\media.wm.edu\path-to-your-storage-folder (the full path will be given to you in the response.) Refer to "Mapping a Network Drive to Your Storage Folder" below for more specific instructions.
  3. Open your mapped drive and drag-and-drop in your media files (files names must be all lower case, no spaces).
  4. Once stored, your media will be publicly-accessible via the web address https://media.wm.edu/content/path-to-your-storage-folder/your-media-filename. Tip: the URL will include the file extension at the end, such as .pdf, .mp3, etc.
Mapping a Network Drive to Your Storage Folder

Specific instructions to follow after you are given access to a storage folder. This is for on-campus computers only.

Using Windows 7 and above:
  1. Open File Explorer.
  2. Right-click on "Computer" or "This PC" in the file tree. Select "Map network drive..."
  3. In the popup window:
    1. Select any available letter for the drive.
    2. For the folder type \\jonesfiles.campus.wm.edu\virtualhosts\media.wm.edu\path-to-your-storage-folder
  4. Finish.
Using OS X:
  1. In the Finder, select "Connect To Server..." from the "Go" menu.
  2. In the Server Address field, enter smb://jonesfiles.campus.wm.edu/virtualhosts/media.wm.edu/path-to-your-storage-folder
  3. Click connect.
  4. When prompted, enter your W&M Username and your password.