Multimedia streaming over ad hoc networks forms a continuous progress domain due to users? growing needs and wireless devices incessant evolution. Our objective, in this study, is to increase individual wireless nodes lifetime by a saving energy model based on video transmission/reception which allows increasing the ad hoc network lifetime. When arriving at a predefined threshold, we reduce the number of multimedia transmitted/received packets by exploiting the MPEG4 enhancement layers. In our proposal we optimize the tradeoff between the energy consumption and the perceived video quality. Simulation results show that we outperform the conventional approach by increasing the overall network lifetime.