We introduce an approach for adaptive minimization of the total power consumption of wireless video communications subject to a given level of quality of service. Our approach exploits tradeoffs between the power consumption of the H.263 encoder, the Reed-Solomon channel encoder and the transmitter. Simulation results show that source and channel coding parameters and transmit energy per bit should vary based on channel conditions. Optimized settings can reduce the total power consumption by a significant factor compared to fixed parameter settings which do not match with the channel conditions.