Discovering a device internal topology, and configuring it at runtime, is one of the goals of the media controller API. To achieve this, hardware devices are modelled as an oriented graph of building blocks called entities connected through pads.

An entity is a basic media hardware or software building block. It can correspond to a large variety of logical blocks such as physical hardware devices (CMOS sensor for instance), logical hardware devices (a building block in a System-on-Chip image processing pipeline), DMA channels or physical connectors.

A pad is a connection endpoint through which an entity can interact with other entities. Data (not restricted to video) produced by an entity flows from the entity's output to one or more entity inputs. Pads should not be confused with physical pins at chip boundaries.

A link is a point-to-point oriented connection between two pads, either on the same entity or on different entities. Data flows from a source pad to a sink pad.