Ok. I am on version 1.4 now! Looks like the boot time has been improved. Not much: by about 10 seconds.
Haven't noticed any other changes yet, but I really didn't have any HDMI problems before, so I can't say if this is fixed or not.
Version 1.2 worked flawlessly for me, but I decided to update to 1.4 anyway, what the heck.
The update took about 45 minutes. No settings (e.g. video mode or speaker configuration) were lost in the process.