@davidn5918184 - What Ann said!
The thing to remember with the peak bitrate values is to take them with a pinch of salt.
Personally, I have found the MainConcept engine used for the stock H.264 Blu-ray selection really is not that good, and can instead highly recommend the x264 Pro plugin. This really is much, much better.
That all said though, freezing & skipping on playback sounds to me like either a player or a media issue rather than a Premiere/Encore issue. The reflectivity on burned discs is nowhere near as good as on a replica/pressed disc.
Watch the total bitrate. In theory you can get 40Mbps peak on video files and on Profile 1.0 you can get a total bitrate of 48Mbps for audio & video combined, although this applies to just the currently active streams of video & audio playing back.
That said, I would steer well clear of theoretical maximum rates as the odds are a written/burned disc will not cope well at these rates whereas a replica will. With H264, you should be able to set a rate of VBR 2-pass at 20 peak 15 average & get a result comparable with anything from a major film studio.