Multimedia applications have intrinsic quality of service (QoS) requirements that may not be captured by the simple traditional completion ratio model. We have proposed a new quantitative QoS metric based on task completion ratio while differentiating firm and soft deadlines and taking data dependency into consideration. Using the decoding of MPEG movies as an example, we have shown that the proposed QoS metric is much better than completion ratio in measuring the quality of presentation (QoP) of the movies. Based on the new QoS metric, we present a set of new online algorithms that outperform popular scheduling algorithms (such as EDF, FCFS, and LETF) and enhance QoP significantly, particularly when the system is overloaded. All the proposed online algorithms have low computation overhead and can be easily integrated into real-time operating systems to improve multimedia embedded system’s performance and/or to save system resources.