I've been looking through Flowplayer's docs to find a way to switch between 3 different quality modes, manually. I am able to find in the docs that Flowplayer supports manual switching of multiple quality streams, but the docs offer no other information or solution, even though it's listed as a feature.
http://flowplayer.org/plugins/streaming/bwcheck.html
Fix: It seems I overlooked the answer. The rate can be changed with "setBitrate(bitrate)", and you can disable dynamic bitrate/bandwidth check.