Even that this is old question just wanted to inform that (1) & (2) are possiable:
sudo mysqldump --databases world --single-transaction --compress --order-by-primary –u <local_user> -p<local_password> | mysql --host hostname –-port 3306 –u <RDS_user_name> –p<RDS_password>
also see: AWS - importing Data from a MySQL DB to an Amazon RDS MySQL DB Instance