I'm really surprised by the "hate" for C that is appearing in these comments. What ever happened to actually enjoying the danger of getting low level? Is assembly also useless because it isn't readable?
There is a lot of great code written in C, and a lot of crappy code written in C. Because C doesn't protect you from yourself, it exacerbates any design flaws your code may have, and makes logical errors ever more insidious. So in this sense, the quality of the C you write is really a reflection of you as a C programmer, not the shortcomings of the language. Maybe you've been badly burned by C in the past, but keep an open mind and understand that C can be beautiful.
If you've ever listened to Rush Limbaugh with your conservative father, you can't go more than 15 minutes without hearing an ad for LifeLock. Their audience seems to be paranoid older people who don't understand technology and are looking for piece of mind.
Side note: Here's another kind of ridiculous service that I hear advertised on conservative talk radio: https://www.reagan.com/
Luckily the video processing libraries provided by Intel/NVIDIA/AMD are cross platform (Win32/Linux). So the arm specific video processing code for the RPI is a different can of worms, the rest of the client (window creation, polling for input, etc) should be able to support Linux and X11 generally.
Client side, we've already done it (we have a Raspberry Pi client that actually works well, but still needs a bit of polish.).
Server side I'm not sure. I know the Windows API for grabbing frames is really good, and I assume there's a similar API for Linux. Shouldn't be too bad. But you will likely see a macOS server first...
I don't disagree completely. A certain subset of gamers (the hardware enthusiasts, pros) will NEVER use something like this.
But certainly over wired LAN it does offer near native performance for most games, past the threshold where many gamers would even be aware they were playing remotely. The real questions are: how good will the internet get, and how quickly will it get there?
I've played CS:GO from NY to Virginia with Parsec (to an AWS machine) and topped the scoreboard consistently (in pugs).
Also did a 3 hour raid night on the new Legion content with it on WoW, lot of dynamic camera movement there. Cleared Nythendra on Heroic as the 4th DPS.
May not be to everyone's liking, but worked for me.
On newer hardware (Geforce GTX 900+ series on the server side, recent Intel HD Graphics on the client) our system only adds 8-10 ms. On older rigs it might be somewhere around 20. Of course the network latency will go on top of that.
We've heard of something like this before, and while we're very much focusing on gaming right now, our goal is to make Parsec general purpose enough to fit into a lot of different use-cases. I see no reason why it couldn't be used for what you're describing.
The main benefits are that it 1) allows you to price compare and 2) it checks compatibility to you don't make mistakes. Hound-O-Matic is a completely automatic and requires simply a budget / vague filters.