[Puzzle] The Quest - SOLUTION

Hello everyone :)

I've got a lot of problems in my life at the moment, and I'm looking for anything that can take my mind off of it... So I made a Puzzle.
I'm not going to say "Here is an easy puzzle" and just hope that you guess or brute force it, I think it is actually a hard one, but I'm still new here so maybe it will be solved quite quickly by some of you.

There is only one giveway, it's not a bundle game, and it has a contribution requirement (if you need me to tell you how much it's not a good sign).

You have 48 hours : The Final Countdown

And the puzzle starts here.

PS: English is not my mothertongue, I'm sorry if I made some grammar mistakes.

HINT : The password is somewhere around here.

Here is the solution of the puzzle.
Congratulations to those who succeeded to entry the giveaway and to anyone who participated.
The game was "Resident Evil 5"

.#1 The starting link for the puzzle was :
http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/uDlAD/vRpmByvc
You arrive to an old metro 2033 giveaway.
Many of you will have notice the code for an itstoohard puzzle in the url : vRpmByvc
171 players found it.

.#2 It brings us here : http://itstoohard.com/puzzle/vRpmByvc
I didn't think this part would be hard, but I'm a space opera addict since Elite on Atari ST.
There is 5 question, each answer is the name of a ship from cinema/tv show/video games.

-This ship is looking for earth : "Battlestar Galactica", my avatar was a big hint already.
-This ship is living : "Living ship" in google was quickly giving the answer, "Moya" from Farscape.
-This ship may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts : That's the description Han Solo made of the "Millennium Falcon".
-This ship is a Firefly-class small transport ship : The answer was almost in the question, it's "Serenity" from the tv-show "Firefly".
-This ship is a prototype frigate : The "Normandy" from mass Effect. Sorry I didn't put the SSV.

56 players solved this puzzle.

.#3 The answer of the puzzle gives us a link to a page from my blog : http://www.geekea.fr/the-quest
There is 2 main elements here : an animated gif (from the IT Crowd) and a bit of code.
The smiley face is just here to say "Hello" :)
The code will be needed later, and I guess the first thing that anyone will try to use first is the QR Code that briefly appears in the gif.
Screenshot or decompose the gif file, however you did it, the QR Code gives you : 1wz0wuY4
The code for the next itstoohard puzzle.
51 players made it this far, we've only lost 5 so I guess it was easy.

.#4 We are now here : http://itstoohard.com/puzzle/1wz0wuY4
Who doesn't remember Quantum Leap ?!
Well if you don't, the name of the picture will give you the name of the tv-show, or an image search, but just copy-pasting the question in google would be enough. Anyway, the question wasn't really meant to be hard, it was just there to hide that the real deal was in the picture.
"What is the name of the other time traveler that Sam meets ?" The answer was "Alia".
50 players solved it. What ? 1 couldn't ?

.#5 zbmnvd.bet/rapelcg
That's the answer the previous puzzle gives. It's just encoded :)
But as ROT13 keeps the number of characters and the punctuation, it looks like a normal url adress from bettonia.
Decoding it gives : mozaiq.org/encrypt
No stats to know how many players found it, sorry.

.#6 Once on mozaiq.org/encrypt, you can see that it's about steganography. But you're on the encryption part of the site, so just click on "decryption". The page asks you for a file and a password.
That's where a lot of people was stuck I think.
Steganography is about hiding a message in a picture, and there is only two pictures in the puzzle, the one from the blog which already found its purpose and the one from the Quantum leap question which was the one hidding a message.
Save the picture from step 4, upload it on the decryption page, and you just need the password.

.#7 The password.
I guess that at this point everyone remembered the code from step 3 : $password = substr(md5($password),0,10);
But it needs a starting word to work. If you go back to the forum (in this very page), you will find it by looking at the source code of the page, you will see a hidden message saying :
"You will need that : $password=zombies"
"zombies" won't work. But now you have the word that goes in the code.

.#8 This damn code !
Here is it : $password=substr(md5(zombies),0,10);
The "$password" on the left is the variable that will contains the result of the right part. So what we have to solve is "substr(md5(zombies),0,10)". We start inside the brackets.
If you look for md5 in google you will find that it's an encryption method. There is plenty of md5 encryption website, the md5 of zombies gives : 9f63025bccd84c9dff056bf5d28100d8
We have now : "substr(9f63025bccd84c9dff056bf5d28100d8,0,10)".
If you look for "substr" in google, you will find what it means. Substr is a function that will take a part of a word... the first part of the things in brackets must be the original word, the second part must be where to start the new word and the third part is its length.
So basically substr(abcd,0,2) will gives the 2 first letters of abcd : "ab".
The 10 first letter of our md5 hash are : 9f63025bcc
That's our password !

.#9 Back to the steganography page, enter the password and decrypt the image.
The message given is : 34393431333834353438363533313465
It's obviously encrypted. But twice. Because encrypting it only once was placing a letter at the end which was making it obvious it was some hexadecimal code. Find a decoding page like asciitohex.com for example and the only decryption that will work is the hexa one. It gives you : 494138454865314e
Here again it's encrypted, but only the hexa decryption will give something : IA8EHe1N
Another itstoohard puzzle, yoooohooo !
http://itstoohard.com/puzzle/IA8EHe1N
24 players made it this far. We've lost 26 of them between step 5 and step 9.

.#10 There is 2 question here, and you can actually easily brute force them but here are the answers :

Sam can't afford to buy cigarettes, so he found a way to smoke without spending anything. He uses cigarettes butts he finds to make a cigarette out of them. With 3 butts he can smoke 1 cigarette. Sam has 10 cigarette butts, how many cigarette can he smoke ?
=> 4. 9 butts will give him 3 cigarettes, so 3 butts one he smoked them, he'll be able to make a last one.

Sam is walking to town with his dog. There is 3 miles from his house to the town. But his dog is old and walks twice as slow as him. When Sam arrives in town, he then goes back to his house and meets his old dog on the way back. The dog makes a u-turn and follows Sam back home, at the same speed. Once back home, how many miles did Sam's dog walk ?
=> 4 again. When Sam reaches the town, his dog is half way (1.5 miles) and continue to walk toward the town whilst Sam comes back. The dog will meet Sam 0.5 miles later (2 miles done) and then goes back home : 4 miles.

All the 24 players solved this one, well done.
The puzzle gives you the last step : "xXxxX http://goo.gl/ZKU6m xXxxX"

.#11 You are now on a picture from twitpic.
If you look at the upload date under the picture you'll guess that i couln't have plan the puzzle that long ago. So the answer is somewhere else.
If you look at the url of the picture it says : http://twitpic.com/gn9ca
You've got it : gn9ca ! If you apply the size of the X's from step 10, you have : gN9cA.

tada : http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/gN9cA

21 players reached the giveaway page for 15 entries, well done !