Embedding YouTube Videos
New to YouTube? Learn about getting started with video storage.
Follow the steps below to place a YouTube video in the main region of a page or a story. You can also place a video in the right column of a page by creating a "YouTube Widget."
Before You Begin: Video Requirements
Videos must include closed captions 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's terms of service, all videos on our Cascade websites must be designated "not made for kids" (general audience) in YouTube Studio. We recommend only embedding videos from an official W&M channel to help ensure this practice is followed.
Step 1: Get the Video ID
- Browse to the video on YouTube
- Right-click within the video
- Select "Stats for nerds"
- In the screen that appears, your Video ID is the short string of letters, numbers, and/or symbols on the first line.
Step 2: Choose video player size
- Small: same size as the YouTube Widget
- Medium: fits in the page content area when the right column is displayed
- Large: fits in the page content area when the right column is not displayed
Step 3: Add video to page
Within the page content, there are 4 video placement options.
- The left-aligned text does not wrap around the video. Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1: {{youtube:size|video-id, video caption}}
- Centered text does not wrap around the video. Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1: {{youtube:size:center|video-id, video caption}}
- Left-aligned text wraps around the video. Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1: {{youtube:size:left|video-id, video caption}}
- Right-aligned text wraps around the video. Type the following directly in the Cascade content editor, substituting "size" with your choice from step 2 and "video-id" with the string of characters from step 1: {{youtube:size:right|video-id, video caption}}
The vertical bar in front of the video ID is often called a "pipe" and is located above the enter key on most keyboards. On some keyboards, it looks like two vertical dashes.
Having trouble?
If your embedded YouTube video is not functioning correctly on your page, you could be experiencing one of the following issues:
- You're not seeing a preview of your embed when you submit your page. Instead, you see the curly bracket snippet with a hyperlinked video ID.
- There should not be any hyperlinked text within your brackets; this can sometimes happen if you copy and paste the video ID from a hyperlinked URL.
- You run into other problems, such as the inserted span tag when pasting the video ID.
Things to try if you see the curly bracket snippet:
- Highlight the hyperlinked text and select the
icon. - Highlight the entire curly bracket snippet and select "clear formatting" from the Format dropdown.
