The next generation of mobile systems with multimedia processing capabilities and wireless connectivity will be increasingly deployed in highly dynamic and distributed environments for multimedia playback and delivery (e.g. video streaming, multimedia conferencing). The challenge is to meet the heavy resource demands of multimedia applications under the stringent energy, computational, and bandwidth constraints of mobile systems, while constantly adapting to the global state changes of the distributed environment. In this paper, we present our initiatives under the FORGE framework to address the issue of delivering high quality multimedia content in mobile environments. In order to cope with the resource intensive nature of multimedia applications and dynamically changing global state (e.g. node mobility, network congestion), an end-to-end approach to QoS aware power optimization is required. We present a framework for coordinating energy optimizing strategies across various layers of system implementation and functionality and discuss techniques that can be employed to achieve energy gains for mobile multimedia systems.