How to verify that an RTMP stream URL is working

We went with FMS because of its built in fuctionality with flash clients, and was still pretty cheap (in context) to license. It also came with some demo apps that almost perfectly suited our needs. In fact if it's <= 5 users then the demo license will be fine.

That said, we didn't look into the Windows Media Server much because we didn't have any developers with experience in it, so I can't provide a fair comparison.

One thing we really liked was the ability in FMS to publish at multiple bit levels, because we were streaming to churches in remote locations they could only handle say 256kbps, whereas those in the city or at home could handle 1500kbps, and FMS let the user switch on the fly without a dropout in stream. It would even automatically switch down a bitrate if the local connection couldn't keep up.

You're not going to be able to filter on something that uses port 80 with any basic firewall. You are going to either need to use a maybe proxy server (actually not even really sure a proxy would be able to pull this off either) or a firewall that can do deep packet inspection (application layer firewall).