[J_E_F_F]

It's rather more complicated than just bitrate. We can play some 10Mbit/s HEVC which is very high for HEVC (with it's higher compression rates).
But it is possible to produce a 1Mbit/s stream we can't play.

Note, that we use GPU acceleration, so if we are dropping frames and the ARM isn't busy, it suggests the GPU is the bottleneck.
Overclocking (v3d_freq, core_freq and sdram_freq) will help the GPU.

Thanks for the details, I didn't know all that. It does lead me to a different question.

I guess I know now that GPU acceleration is completely unrelated to hardware decoding?
I have my core_freq at 550 and sdram_freq at 600, what would you recommend for v3d_freq on a RPi2?

I do use avoid_pwm_pll=1 because in the past (have not tried in many months) without it and the core_freq overclocked, after watching a h264 movie, the h264 freq would not dynamically slow back down, it would stay pegged at 500 as noted by bcmstat.sh

*edit* Just tried without avoid_pwm_pll=1, same issue, the h264 stays at 250 without going back to 0 after watching h264 content. Is that an issue?