In this study, a platform-independent energy estimation methodology is proposed to estimate the energy consumption of reconfigurable video coding (RVC)-CAL video codec specifications. This methodology is based on the performance monitoring counters (PMCs) of embedded platforms and demonstrates its portability, simplicity and accuracy for on-line estimation. It has two off-line procedure stages: the former, which automatically identifies the most appropriate PMCs with no specific detailed knowledge of the employed platform, and the latter, which trains the model using either a linear regression or a multivariable adaptive regression splines (MARS) method. Experimenting on an RVC-CAL decoder, the proposed PMC-driven model can achieve an average estimation error