Back to my original question, I just started looking at python QR libraries and such. I might see if I can hack together something rough. I found that using zbar, I can reliably read the QR code using my webcam and it appears to have Python bindings so it might not be too bad.
The question is: is it easy to integrate the live webcam feed through the PyQt user interface? I've done video and image capture with python before, but didn't know how complex it would be to have a 5+ FPS viewer in the app so that you can see whether the QR code is centered & zoomed properly in real time. However, if someone points me to a way to do it that is relatively easy and liberally-licensed, then I'll do it! At some point we might want to integrated QR-video, anyway, so this might be a good first step...