This paper investigates the potential for automatic mapping of typical embedded applications to architectures with multimedia instruction set extensions. For this purpose a (pattern matching based) code transformation engine is used, which involves a three-step process of matching, condition checking and replacing of the source code. Experiments with DSP and the MPEG2 encoder benchmarks, show that about 85% of the loops which are suitable for Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) parallelization can be automatically recognized and mapped.