I'm answering only the part of the question about zbar installation.
I spent nearly half an hour a few hours to make it work on Windows + Python 2.7 64-bit, so here are additional notes to the accepted answer:
Install it with pip install zbar-0.10-cp27-none-win_amd64.whl
If Python reports an ImportError: DLL load failed: The specified module could not be found. when doing import zbar, then you will just need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable Packages for VS 2013 (I spent a lot of time here, trying to recompile unsuccessfully...)
Required too: libzbar64-0.dll must be in a folder which is in the PATH. In my case I copied it to "C:\Python27\libzbar64-0.dll" (which is in the PATH). If it still does not work, add this:
import os
os.environ['PATH'] += ';C:\\Python27'
import zbar
PS: Making it work with Python 3.x is even more difficult: Compile zbar for Python 3.x.
PS2: I just tested pyzbar with pip install pyzbar and it's MUCH easier, it works out-of-the-box (the only thing is you need to have VC Redist 2013 files installed). It is also recommended to use this library in this pyimagesearch.com article.