This paper presents a novel low-power joint decoding system composed of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detector, low-density parity-check (LDPC) channel decoder, and H.264 source decoder for energyaware and cross-layer source-channel transmission systems. Our aim is to achieve a minimum power design that meets the expected quality of service (QoS) at the application layer. This design includes an iterative MIMO-LDPC decoder for minimizing communication errors and an unequal error protection scheme for reducing energy consumption in transmission. The experiment results reveal that our proposed iterative MIMO-LDPC-H.264 joint decoder achieved up to 66% energy reduction with only 0.09 dB peak signal-tonoise ratio degradation when compared to a non-UEP based joint source-channel decoding system.INDEX TERMS MIMO, LDPC, iterative decoding, unequal error protection, H.264/H.265 data partitioning, joint source-channel decoding, low-power design, error resilience, energy-aware communication system, QoS for video processing