In the past few years, the ubiquity of embedded mobile computing brings about a new challenge for multimedia application. Not only the performance but also the power consumption is vital to the multimedia application because mobile clients are powered by battery. In this paper, we make the detailed power consumption analysis of multimedia applications with two power reduction techniques—ideal clock gating and ideal power gating. Experimental results show the power consumptions can be reduced to 35.22% and 15.68% by ideal clock gating and ideal power gating, respectively. Our primary contributions lie in evaluating the power characteristics of multimedia applications using MediaBench benchmark suite, and evaluating the impact of unideal power reduction techniques on the performance. Such an analysis can help the multimedia applications developers determine the efficient power optimization policy besides the performance optimization. Low-power embedded multimedia applications are promising in the future.