I have used ZBar for several projects and it has worked great. It is very accurate and fast, and I have found it to be a great tool for extracting barcode data from various sources. The interface is also very user-friendly and easy to navigate. Highly recommend!
ZBar 0.10 could be downloaded from the developer's website when we last checked. We cannot confirm if there is a free download of this software available. The actual developer of the free program is Jeff Brown. Commonly, this program's installer has the following filename: zbar.exe. ZBar is included in Development Tools. We recommend checking the downloaded files with any free antivirus. The following version: 0.1 is the most frequently downloaded one by the program users.
From the developer:
ZBar is a software suite for reading bar codes from various sources, such as video streams, image files and raw intensity sensors.
It supports many popular symbologies (types of bar codes) including EAN-13/UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN-8, Code 128, Code 9, Interleaved 2 of 5 and QR Code.
You may want to check out more software, such as Help Generator for Visual Studio 2005, Shelled! or OxyProject Metrics Standard Edition, which might be similar to ZBar.