I did have a look at some samples from German DVB-T2. It seems they use the following resolutions:
960 x 540/p50 (Quarter HD)
1280 x 720p/p50
1920 x 1080/p50
1920x1080p/p50 will never be possible on a Pi3. You will need something with hardware decode support for this.
1280x720p/p50 should be possible. I think they use weighted B slices which isn't currently GPU accelerated, but could be in theory.
960x540p/p50 should be fine.
If your initial test was positive it probably was using one of the lower resolution streams.